Climate awareness: heat alerts & action
Too Hot is a climate activism project centered on its2hot.org. The idea is simple: compare today’s forecast temperature to a long-term historical average for the same calendar day and location. When the forecast is hotter than “normal” by a set margin, the system treats it as a heat anomaly worth noticing—and encourages visible, conversation-starting responses.
What the product does
- Temperature monitoring — Uses weather API data for the user’s area and compares the current (or forecast high) temperature against roughly 30 years of historical norms for that date.
- Anomaly threshold — Alerts fire when the temperature is hotter than the historical average by at least a configured margin (e.g. 10 °F in production; lower in development for testing).
- Notifications — Subscribers can get email and/or push notifications (via the Expo/React Native app with Firebase) when a check finds an extreme-heat condition—so people know “today counts” without watching the forecast all day.
- Merchandise — The campaign promotes wearing an “IT’S TOO HOT!” shirt on those unusually hot days to spark conversations about climate change; the site includes a shop flow (PayPal, Printful fulfillment).
- Community signup — Visitors can join the mailing list (optional location) to stay in the loop with the broader movement.
How checks run
A scheduled job (Cloud Scheduler in production) periodically hits the backend to run temperature checks: fetch conditions, compare to the historical baseline, log results, and send notifications when the threshold is exceeded. Frequency is configurable (e.g. daily in production, more often in dev).
Stack (summary)
| Web & API | Flask — campaign pages, REST API (subscribe, device registration, alert checks, admin). |
|---|---|
| Mobile | Expo / React Native app (its2hot-app/) — push alerts, shop, “Too Hot Today” anomaly view. |
| Ops | Docker; Google Cloud Run deployment; admin dashboard for subscribers, logs, alert settings, test sends. |
Full endpoints, env vars, and ops guides are in the repository README.
This page on hromp.com
Production content and the app are hosted at its2hot.org, not under /too-hot/ on hromp. This URL is a mirror of the project listing on the main personal site so the portfolio and homepage link graph stay consistent with other projects.