Tsunami Warning Tracker: Active NOAA Alerts

Active tsunami warnings, watches and advisories for U.S. coasts, for coastal emergency management, ports and shipping, and coastal property and insurance teams. Check the whole country or only the coastal states you care about, and get each active alert from the official National Weather Service feed: severity, affected area, instructions and timing.

What you get

• One row per active alert: type, severity, urgency, headline, affected areas, issuing office, start and expiry times, and the official instructions
• When nothing is active, one row that says so, so an all-clear never looks like an empty result

Output (sample)

{
  "rowType": "alert",
  "status": "active_alert",
  "id": "urn:oid:2.49.0.1.840.0.abc123",
  "event": "Tsunami Warning",
  "severity": "Extreme",
  "certainty": "Observed",
  "urgency": "Immediate",
  "headline": "Tsunami Warning issued for the coastal areas of California",
  "description": "A tsunami warning is in effect...",
  "instruction": "Move to high ground or inland immediately.",
  "areaDesc": "Coastal Los Angeles County",
  "senderName": "NWS Los Angeles CA",
  "effective": "2026-09-19T08:00:00-07:00",
  "expires": "2026-09-19T14:00:00-07:00",
  "nwsUrl": "https://api.weather.gov/alerts/urn:oid:...",
  "checkedAt": "2026-09-19T15:05:00.000Z"
}

Most of the time there is no tsunami alert anywhere. Then the output is a single row that says so, instead of an empty table:

{
  "rowType": "note",
  "status": "no_active_alerts",
  "event": null,
  "headline": "No active tsunami warnings, watches or advisories for CA, HI",
  "description": "The National Weather Service had no active tsunami warnings, watches or advisories for CA, HI when checked at 2026-10-12T15:56:27.427Z.",
  "areaDesc": "CA, HI",
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-12T15:56:27.427Z"
}

rowType tells the rows apart: "alert" for an active alert, "note" for the no-alerts row, and "error" for the input-problem row.

If none of the areas or alert types you entered can be understood, you get one "status": "input_error" row explaining what to fix, and nothing is charged. An area or alert type that can't be understood is never dropped silently in a way that widens the search: you only ever get tsunami alerts.

Who this is for

• Coastal emergency management teams running a standing check on their coastline.
• Ports and shipping operations deciding whether to hold or divert vessels.
• Coastal property and insurance teams who need an automated trigger for a wider alert process.

Input

Field	Type	Description
areas	array	US states or territories, as two-letter codes (["CA", "HI", "AK"]) or names ("California"). Leave empty for all coastal areas nationwide.
severities	array	Limit to "Tsunami Warning", "Tsunami Watch", "Tsunami Advisory", in any capitalisation, singular or plural. The short forms "warning", "watch" and "advisory" work too. Leave empty for all three.

{
  "areas": ["CA", "HI"]
}

How it works

One direct call to the official NWS/NOAA alerts API (api.weather.gov), the same data source and reliability pattern already proven in US Weather Tracker and Field Operations Risk Briefing in this portfolio: automatic retries on transient failures, a per-attempt timeout so a slow response cannot hang the run. No key, no proxy, no scraping, public-domain US government data.

Pricing note

Billed per check, not per alert returned: one charge whether the check finds no active tsunami alerts or several. A run that can't check anything, because none of the areas or alert types could be understood, isn't charged.

Related products

• US Weather Forecast & Alerts API (NWS): everyday NWS forecasts and alerts for a specific location, not scoped to tsunamis