NWS Active Weather Alerts — Multi-State Exporter

Export current official U.S. National Weather Service alerts for one or more states, territories, or marine areas in a single run. Filter by event text, severity, urgency, and certainty, then send clean records to a dataset, webhook, spreadsheet, database, or scheduled workflow.

This HTTP-only Apify Actor uses the public National Weather Service Alerts API. It needs no customer login, cookie, proxy, or third-party API subscription.

Quick start

1. Enter one or more two-letter area codes and optional filters.
2. Keep the result limit small for the first run.
3. Click Start and export the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, RSS, or HTML.

{
  "areas": ["CA", "OR", "WA"],
  "severity": "Severe",
  "maxItems": 25
}

Leave areas empty for a nationwide snapshot. The Actor accepts state and territory codes such as CA, TX, and PR, plus NWS marine area codes such as LM.

What each result includes

Each unique alert contains its official identity and source URL, classification, full timing window, affected-area text, zones and geocodes, headline, description, safety instruction, CAP metadata, references, parameters, and geometry when the NWS supplies it.

Useful workflows

• Multi-state operations and logistics monitoring
• Safety, event, facility, and route-risk dashboards
• Scheduled alert feeds keyed by stable NWS alert ID
• Newsroom, research, insurance, and emergency-management exports

Reliability and billing design

• Inputs and pagination are bounded to prevent accidental runaway jobs.
• Temporary rate limits and server errors are retried with exponential backoff.
• Unexpected source response shapes fail the run instead of producing a misleading empty success.
• Duplicate source records are removed within a run.
• One NWS request can cover up to 25 area codes, reducing latency and platform cost.
• Each successfully written dataset row is ready for a future pay-per-result event; source errors are never charged as results.
• The runtime stops cleanly when an Apify maximum-charge limit is reached.

Data source and limitations

Source: https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-alerts

The Actor returns a current snapshot; it does not maintain historical state or decide which alerts are new. For change detection, schedule runs and compare id, sentAt, and messageType downstream. NWS recommends requesting new alerts no more than once every 30 seconds.

This independent community Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by NOAA or the National Weather Service. It returns public records as supplied by the source and does not independently verify their accuracy. Source coverage, update cadence, field completeness, and rate limits can change. Users remain responsible for interpreting and using the data lawfully. NWS CAP must not be used to activate Emergency Alert System encoder/decoder equipment.