Severe Weather Business Impact Monitor — NWS, By Location

Nobody wants a raw statewide weather-alert feed. A trucking company wants to know if a route is affected. A retail chain wants to know if a specific store is under a warning. An insurer wants exposure by address, not by state.

This matches NOAA's live active-alert feed against your specific business locations (lat/lon) — not a firehose, a filtered answer.

Severity, urgency, and certainty are NWS's own official classification, passed through directly. Unlike most of this portfolio's other feed-matcher actors, no heuristic scoring was needed here — the source already ranks itself.

How it works

1. Each location's lat/lon is resolved to its NWS forecast zone and county zone via the official /points endpoint.
2. Active alerts for that location's state are fetched once (cached per run — 10 locations in the same state means one alert fetch, not ten).
3. An alert matches a location if either of its resolved zones appears in the alert's own zone list — not a distance calculation, the same zone system NWS itself uses to scope an alert.

Input

{
  "locations": [
    { "label": "Warehouse A", "lat": 34.05, "lon": -118.24 },
    { "label": "Store #12", "lat": 40.71, "lon": -74.00 }
  ],
  "minSeverity": "Moderate"
}

US locations only — NWS coverage.

Sample output

{
  "locationLabel": "Lompoc facility",
  "resolvedCity": "Lompoc",
  "resolvedState": "CA",
  "event": "Wind Advisory",
  "severity": "Moderate",
  "urgency": "Expected",
  "certainty": "Likely",
  "headline": "Wind Advisory issued September 3 at 7:53AM PDT until September 4 at 6:00AM PDT by NWS Los Angeles/Oxnard CA",
  "instruction": "Winds this strong can make driving difficult, especially for high profile vehicles.",
  "expires": "2026-09-04T06:00:00-07:00"
}

Typical uses

• Logistics / trucking — check active alerts along a set of route waypoints before dispatch.
• Retail chain operations — know which specific stores are under an active warning, not just "somewhere in the state."
• Insurance exposure monitoring — track active severe-weather risk across a portfolio of insured addresses.
• Field service / event planning — check a job site or venue before sending crews or opening gates.

Pricing

$2.00 / 1,000 results ($0.002 per matched alert row).

⚠️ Read before you act

• This is a real-time snapshot of ACTIVE alerts only — it does not forecast, and it doesn't retain history. Pair with a schedule for ongoing monitoring rather than treating one run as a standing watch.
• US locations only. NWS has no coverage outside US territory; a location outside coverage returns a clear error in the problems report, not a silent empty result.
• Zone matching, not distance. A location right on a zone boundary matches based on which NWS zone it falls in, the same way NWS itself scopes an alert — not a radius calculation.

FAQ

• Do I need an API key? No — api.weather.gov is free and keyless. It only requires a descriptive User-Agent header (NWS's documented etiquette, not an auth mechanism).
• Why pass severity/urgency/certainty through unchanged? NWS already publishes an official classification for every alert — re-deriving it would be strictly worse than the source, so this actor trusts it directly.
• Can I filter to only severe alerts? Yes — set minSeverity to "Severe" or "Extreme" to exclude lower-severity advisories.

Related actors

• Recall Exposure Monitor — the same "official feed, filtered to what actually matters to you" pattern, for CPSC product recalls.
• Layoff Early Warning (WARN Act) — the same pattern again, for mass-layoff filings.