NASA EONET Natural Events Scraper

Extract structured natural event data from NASA's Earth Observatory Natural Event Tracker (EONET) — a curated, machine-readable feed of currently unfolding natural events on Earth. This Actor wraps the official EONET v3 API into a powerful, filterable data pipeline that delivers wildfires, severe storms, volcanic eruptions, floods, landslides, droughts, dust storms, icebergs, and more — all in a single, clean JSON payload ready for analytics, dashboards, or RAG ingestion.

EONET aggregates events from authoritative sources including InciWeb (US wildfire incidents), IRWIN (interagency wildfire), GDACS (Global Disaster Alert), PDC (Pacific Disaster Center), NOAA NHC (National Hurricane Center), Smithsonian Global Volcanism, and the U.S. National Ice Center. Each event includes precise geometry (point or polygon coordinates), magnitude (acres burned, storm category, etc.), source attribution, and a stable EONET ID for tracking events as they evolve.

Key Features

• Real-time natural event feed — Hundreds of currently active wildfires, storms, and volcanic events
• 13 event categories — Wildfires, severe storms, volcanoes, floods, landslides, droughts, dust/haze, earthquakes, manmade events, sea/lake ice, snow, temperature extremes, water color
• Geometry coordinates extracted — Latest known latitude/longitude per event
• Magnitude filtering — Filter wildfires by minimum acres burned, or storms by category number
• Bounding box support — Restrict results to a geographic region (e.g., continental US, California, Pacific basin)
• Status filtering — Only active (open) events, only resolved (closed), or both
• Date range filtering — Days-back shorthand or explicit start/end date
• Source filtering — Pull only events confirmed by a trusted source (e.g., InciWeb for US wildfires)
• No authentication required — Public NASA API, no keys or credentials

Output Data Fields

Field	Type	Description
eventId	string	Stable EONET event identifier (e.g., EONET_20098)
title	string	Human-readable event title
description	string	Optional description (often null)
categoryId / categoryTitle	string	Primary event category
allCategories	array	All assigned category titles
status	string	"open" or "closed"
closedDate	string	Date the event was closed, if applicable
latestDate	string	Date of latest observation/geometry
latestLatitude / latestLongitude	number	Latest known coordinates
latestMagnitudeValue / latestMagnitudeUnit	number/string	Magnitude (e.g., acres for wildfires)
geometryPointCount	integer	Number of geometry observations recorded
sourceIds	string	Comma-separated source ID list
sourceUrls	array	URLs to original source records
eventUrl	string	EONET canonical event URL

How to Scrape NASA EONET Natural Events

1. Open the NASA EONET Natural Events Scraper Actor in Apify Store.
2. Click Start to open the input form.
3. (Optional) Choose a Category (e.g., wildfires, severeStorms, volcanoes).
4. (Optional) Set Status to open for active events only.
5. (Optional) Set Days Back to limit to the last N days.
6. (Optional) Enter a Bounding Box to restrict by geography.
7. Set Max Results to control the output size.
8. Click Start and download the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Input Example

{
    "category": "wildfires",
    "status": "open",
    "days": 30,
    "bbox": "-125,24,-66,49",
    "minMagnitude": 1000,
    "maxResults": 500
}

Output Example

{
    "eventId": "EONET_20098",
    "title": "Eagle Lake Fire Wildfire, Hancock, Iowa",
    "categoryTitle": "Wildfires",
    "status": "open",
    "latestDate": "2026-05-14T11:04:00Z",
    "latestLatitude": 43.11279415,
    "latestLongitude": -93.72348843,
    "latestMagnitudeValue": 550,
    "latestMagnitudeUnit": "acres",
    "sourceIds": "IRWIN",
    "eventUrl": "https://eonet.gsfc.nasa.gov/api/v3/events/EONET_20098"
}

Pricing

This Actor is priced at $0.003 per event extracted. Apify compute costs are billed separately. A typical run extracting 500 active wildfires costs approximately $1.50 plus a few cents of compute. There are no API rate limits or external account fees — NASA's EONET API is free and open to the public.

Use Cases

• Wildfire situational awareness — Build dashboards tracking active US wildfires by acres burned
• Disaster response — Aggregate active storms, floods, and landslides for emergency operations
• Insurance risk modeling — Feed live volcanic and storm events into property risk engines
• Climate research — Build historical datasets of natural events for ML training
• News and media — Power "live disaster map" features for newsroom dashboards
• RAG / LLM pipelines — Ingest structured natural event data into Claude- or GPT-powered agents

Related Actors

• USGS Earthquake Scraper — Real-time global earthquake feed from USGS
• USGS Volcano Monitor Scraper — US volcano alert status and aviation color codes
• NOAA NCEI Climate Scraper — Daily climate observation summaries
• CISA KEV Scraper — Known exploited cyber vulnerabilities (different domain, similar pattern)

FAQ

Q: How fresh is the data? A: EONET is updated multiple times daily as new events are detected and existing ones evolve. Each run fetches the current feed.

Q: Does this need an API key? A: No. The EONET API is public and unauthenticated.

Q: Can I scrape historical events? A: Yes — set startDate and endDate to a historical window, and status to all or closed.

Q: What's the maximum number of events? A: EONET typically tracks a few hundred active events at any time. The Actor supports up to 50,000 results per run.

Legal

This Actor wraps NASA's publicly accessible EONET API. NASA data is generally in the public domain under NASA's usage guidelines. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA. Users are responsible for complying with all applicable terms of use.