NWS US Weather Alerts Scraper

Extract active US National Weather Service (NWS) weather alerts including tornado warnings, severe thunderstorm warnings, flash flood warnings, winter storm watches, heat advisories, and dozens of other public-safety alert types. Data is pulled live from the official US government feed at api.weather.gov/alerts/active and updated continuously — typically within seconds of being issued by a regional NWS forecast office.

This Actor wraps the NWS public alerts API into a clean, filterable scraper that returns one record per active alert with all the fields you need to triage, route, or visualize: the event type, severity (Extreme/Severe/Moderate/Minor), urgency (Immediate/Expected/Future), affected counties and states, effective and expiration timestamps, full headline and description text, and the issuing NWS office.

Features

• Real-time active alerts — Pulls the live feed of every currently-active NWS public alert across the United States.
• State filtering — Pass an array of two-letter state codes (e.g. ['TX','OK','KS']) to narrow the scrape.
• Severity / urgency filtering — Focus on Extreme + Immediate alerts only, or pull the full firehose.
• Event-type filtering — Partial match on event type (e.g. 'Tornado' matches Tornado Warning + Tornado Watch).
• Rich payload — Includes affected zone IDs, polygon geometry where available, and free-text instruction fields useful for downstream NLP / RAG pipelines.

Output fields

Field	Type	Description
id	string	NWS unique alert ID (URN)
event	string	Event type (e.g. "Tornado Warning")
severity	string	Extreme / Severe / Moderate / Minor / Unknown
urgency	string	Immediate / Expected / Future / Past / Unknown
certainty	string	Observed / Likely / Possible / Unlikely / Unknown
areaDesc	string	Human-readable affected area description
states	array	List of state codes extracted from areaDesc
affectedZones	array	NWS forecast zone IDs
effective	datetime	When the alert takes effect
expires	datetime	When the alert expires
headline	string	Short alert headline
description	string	Full alert text
instruction	string	Public safety instructions
senderName	string	Issuing NWS forecast office
geometry	object	GeoJSON polygon (when available)

How to scrape NWS weather alerts

1. Click Run with empty input to pull every currently-active US weather alert (typically 200–800 records).
2. To narrow scope, set the states input to ['TX','OK'] for Texas + Oklahoma only.
3. To get only the most urgent alerts, set severity to Extreme and urgency to Immediate.
4. Use eventFilter (e.g. Tornado or Flood) for event-type filtering.

Pricing

Pay-per-result: $0.003/result. A typical full-US empty-input scrape returns 300–600 alerts. Apify compute is charged separately at platform rates.

Use cases

• Build a real-time public safety dashboard scoped to specific states or event types
• Feed alerts into an LLM/RAG pipeline for natural-language risk summaries
• Trigger downstream automations (insurance claims pre-staging, logistics rerouting) on Severe/Extreme alerts
• Backfill a weather-impact dataset alongside scheduled scrapes

FAQ

Is this real-time? Yes — api.weather.gov updates continuously. Each Actor run pulls a fresh snapshot.

Do I need an API key? No. NWS provides this data without authentication.

Does it cover Puerto Rico / territories? Yes, US territories with NWS coverage are included.

Legal

This Actor uses publicly available data from the US National Weather Service, a federal agency that publishes weather data into the public domain. No authentication is bypassed and no rate limits are violated. Use of this Actor is for legitimate public-safety, research, or commercial purposes only. Contact support via the Apify Console with any issues.