🌪 NWS Active Weather Alerts Scraper

Export every active National Weather Service alert as a row: event type, severity, urgency, certainty, the counties and zones it covers, when it was issued, when it expires, and the official headline and instruction. 14 fields per alert. No API key, no registration, no login.

The National Weather Service publishes every active watch, warning and advisory in the United States. The feed is authoritative and it is also built for machines: alerts arrive as nested CAP records with geocode blocks and time zone offsets to untangle. This Actor flattens them into rows, filters them by state, severity, urgency or event type, and writes them to a dataset you can open in a spreadsheet.

Who uses it	What they use the alerts for
🏬 Buyers of businesses with physical sites	Seeing which stores, yards or plants in a target's footprint sit under an active warning
🚚 Operations and logistics teams	Holding or rerouting around flood and wind advisories by county
🏦 Insurers and risk analysts	Keeping a dated record of severe weather by area code for a claims or underwriting file
📰 Newsrooms and alerting tools	Pulling active alerts by state or event type on a schedule

📋 What it does

💡 Why it matters: a business with locations is a business with weather exposure. Alerts carry the counties in the record, so a site list can be matched against them instead of read off a map.

• 🌩 Returns one row per active alert, flattened out of the NWS CAP feed.
• 🗺 Filters by area. area takes a US state code such as CA or TX, or a marine area code.
• 🚨 Filters by severity and urgency. Extreme through Minor, and Immediate through Past.
• 🏷 Filters by event type. Tornado Warning, Flood Watch and every other NWS event name.
• 📍 Keeps the geocodes. SAME and UGC codes come back in the row, which is how an alert is matched to a county or a forecast zone.
• ⏱ Carries the full timeline: when it was sent, when it takes effect, and when it expires, each with its local offset.
• 💾 Exports to CSV, Excel, JSON or XML, from the run page or the API.

📊 Output

Every alert is one flat row, with the same 14 fields on every run.

Field	Type	Description
🆔 id	string	The NWS alert identifier, a urn:oid: string unique to that alert
🌪 event	string	Event type, for example Flood Watch, Coastal Flood Advisory
🚨 severity	string	Extreme, Severe, Moderate, Minor or Unknown
⏳ urgency	string	Immediate, Expected, Future, Past or Unknown
🎯 certainty	string	How confident the forecast office is, for example Likely, Possible
🗺 area_desc	string	The affected areas as the NWS names them, semicolon separated
📤 sent	string	When the alert was issued, with its local UTC offset
▶️ effective	string	When the alert takes effect
⏹ expires	string	When the alert expires
📰 headline	string	The official one line headline, including the issuing office
📋 instruction	string	The protective action text the NWS publishes with the alert
📍 geocode	object	Area codes for the alert. SAME holds FIPS county codes, UGC holds forecast zone codes
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of collection
⚠️ error	string	null on a normal row

Example rows

{
  "id": "urn:oid:2.49.0.1.840.0.7625bdc62d9d4a019b589fac6f706e0df337cb17.001.2",
  "event": "Coastal Flood Advisory",
  "severity": "Minor",
  "urgency": "Expected",
  "certainty": "Likely",
  "area_desc": "Kuskokwim Delta Coast and Nunivak Island",
  "sent": "2026-09-14T08:26:00-08:00",
  "effective": "2026-09-14T08:26:00-08:00",
  "expires": "2026-09-15T07:00:00-08:00",
  "headline": "Coastal Flood Advisory issued September 14 at 8:26AM AKDT until September 16 at 10:00AM AKDT by NWS Anchorage AK",
  "instruction": "A coastal flood advisory indicates that onshore winds and tides\nwill combine to generate flooding of low areas along the shore.\n\n\n-AM",
  "geocode": {
    "SAME": [
      "002050"
    ],
    "UGC": [
      "AKZ755"
    ]
  },
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-14T16:29:16.223Z",
  "error": null
}

{
  "id": "urn:oid:2.49.0.1.840.0.192fe0a99e97657cfda64edd8520b15c95abeb4f.001.1",
  "event": "Flood Watch",
  "severity": "Severe",
  "urgency": "Future",
  "certainty": "Possible",
  "area_desc": "Poweshiek; Marion; Lucas; Decatur; Wayne",
  "sent": "2026-09-14T11:24:00-05:00",
  "effective": "2026-09-14T11:24:00-05:00",
  "expires": "2026-09-15T07:30:00-05:00",
  "headline": "Flood Watch issued September 14 at 11:24AM CDT until September 16 at 1:00PM CDT by NWS Des Moines IA",
  "instruction": "For the latest stream observations and forecasts refer to\nweather.gov/desmoines/water.",
  "geocode": {
    "SAME": [
      "019157",
      "019125",
      "019117",
      "019053",
      "019185"
    ],
    "UGC": [
      "IAZ062",
      "IAZ074",
      "IAZ084",
      "IAZ094",
      "IAZ095"
    ]
  },
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-14T16:29:16.303Z",
  "error": null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

	What you get
The official source	Rows come from the National Weather Service itself, not from a weather app repackaging it.
County codes in the row	SAME and UGC codes let you join alerts to a site list by county instead of by name.
Four filters, applied at the source	Area, severity, urgency and event type narrow the run before anything is collected.
Stable columns	Re-run every hour and append into one dataset without cleaning headers.
You pay per alert	No subscription. A filter that matches nothing costs nothing.

🚀 How to use it

1. Create a free Apify account. New accounts start with $5 of credit.
2. Open the Actor and select Try for free.
3. Set area to a state code, or leave it empty for the whole country.
4. Narrow with severity, urgency or event, and set maxItems to cap the run.
5. Select Start, then export from the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML.

A first run, everything active:

{
  "severity": "all",
  "urgency": "all",
  "maxItems": 10
}

Severe alerts in Texas that are already in effect:

{
  "area": "TX",
  "severity": "Severe",
  "urgency": "Immediate",
  "maxItems": 200
}

⚙️ Input

Field	Required	Description
area	No	US state code such as CA or TX, or a marine area code. Empty covers the country
severity	No	all, Extreme, Severe, Moderate, Minor or Unknown. Defaults to all
urgency	No	all, Immediate, Expected, Future, Past or Unknown. Defaults to all
event	No	Event type such as Tornado Warning or Flood Watch. Empty covers every event
maxItems	No	Maximum alerts to collect in a run. Defaults to 10

💰 Pricing

Pay per result. No subscription, and no Apify platform usage on top.

Apify plan	Free	Bronze	Silver	Gold	Platinum	Diamond
Per alert row	$0.0085	$0.00817	$0.00783	$0.0075	$0.0075	$0.0075

Rows collected	Cost on the Free plan
100	$0.85
1,000	$8.50
10,000	$85.00

Free plan runs return up to 10 rows as a preview. Any paid Apify plan lifts that to 1,000,000 per run.

🔌 Integrate with any app

The dataset is available through the Apify API as soon as the run finishes. Use run-sync-get-dataset-items for a one-shot call, webhooks to trigger what happens next, or the Make, Zapier, Airbyte and LangChain integrations listed on the Actor page.

🤖 Use with an AI agent

Give an agent live access to the alert feed over the Model Context Protocol:

$claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=acquistion-automation/nws-active-alerts-scraper"

Then ask it in plain language which severe alerts are active in a state and have it read them back.

❓ Frequently asked questions

Does this return historical alerts? No. It returns alerts that are active at the moment of the run. To build a history, schedule the Actor and append every run into the same dataset.

Does it include the full alert narrative? It returns the headline and the instruction. The longer forecast discussion that some alerts carry is not part of the row.

How do I match an alert to my own locations? Use geocode. SAME holds FIPS county codes and UGC holds NWS forecast zone codes, which is what the alert is actually issued against. area_desc is the same areas in words.

Why do the timestamps have different offsets? Each alert carries the local offset of the office that issued it, so an Alaska alert reads -08:00 and an Iowa one reads -05:00. scrapedAt is always UTC.

Do I need a proxy? No. Requests and retries are handled inside the Actor and included in the price.

What can I export? CSV, Excel, JSON and XML from the run page, or JSON straight from the API.

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About Acquisition Automation Co.

We build automation for people buying businesses. The repetitive part of an acquisition search, checking listings, pulling public records, tracking owners and assets, is work a machine should do, so the buyer's time goes into judging deals instead of collecting them.

We add new Actors regularly. If there is a source you need and do not see here, tell us.

🆘 Support

Open an issue in the Issues tab of this Actor with your run ID, the input you used, and what you expected to get back.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This Actor is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the National Weather Service, NOAA or any government agency. It collects only publicly available data and must not be relied on as a life safety warning system. Always follow official alerts from weather.gov and your local authorities.