Check the conditions before a session

The Sunday-evening job: work out what this week's sessions are going to be like, decide what members need telling, and do it in one pass rather than opening a weather app once per venue. This recipe assumes weather is switched on for your club. It is in beta, so ask us if it is not.

Who: any volunteer or committee member who can see the club's events. Where: the volunteer console, on a phone. Takes: about 5 minutes.

Before you start

• Weather is switched on for your club. If no event shows conditions at all, that is the likeliest reason.
• The sessions you care about have a location with a pin on the map. An event without one has nowhere to forecast for, and shows nothing.
• Only the next week or so will have anything on it. See Weather on events → How it works.

Steps

1. Open the console's Events tab and choose This week.
2. Read down the conditions beside each session. A session with no reading is either too far off or missing a location. Both are worth a glance, and neither is a fault.
3. Open any session whose reading gives you pause. The panel gives you the verdict, the figures behind it, and the kit worth mentioning.
4. Where the Met Office has a warning out, read it in full through the link. It is the forecaster's own wording, and it covers the whole area and period rather than your two hours.
5. Decide what your club wants to do. The reading is the environmental part of a risk assessment. The rest of it is yours, and so is the decision.
6. If members need telling — headtorches on Thursday, an earlier start on a muggy Saturday — send them a message. See Communications.
7. If a session is off, set the event's status to Cancelled in the admin panel and message members. Cancelling does not email anyone by itself.

What happens next

• Members see the same conditions on the event in the member app and on your club's website, with the kit suggestions and the same wording about a forecast being an estimate.
• Nothing you read here is recorded as a decision. Only changing the event — its status, its time, its location — changes anything for members, and that shows in your activity log.
• Once the event has happened, its conditions stop changing and stay on the event as a record of the day, labelled either as the last forecast before the start or as what was observed.

If it does not work

This week's list shows no conditions at all

Either the feature is not switched on for your club — it is in beta, so ask us — or none of this week's events has a location with a pin.

One session shows nothing while the others do

That event is missing a location, or its location was typed as text rather than pinned on the map. Fix it under Events → Event Configuration → Locations and the conditions follow on their own.

The reading disagrees with the weather app on my phone

It very likely will, and neither is wrong. Ours covers the hours between the event's start and end time at the pinned location, and heat is banded on humidity as well as temperature. A phone app usually shows the day, for the town.

I want to know whether the club is cancelling

Nothing in the conditions answers that. Ask whoever leads the session. If that is you, the decision is yours to make and to tell people about.

See also

• Weather on events — the standards behind each reading, and what we do not do
• Events
• The volunteer console