Space Weather Alert — Aurora Visibility & HF Radio Blackout

One snapshot combining the space-weather numbers ham radio operators, aurora chasers, and HF/satellite comms people currently check by hand across several NOAA pages:

• Geomagnetic Kp index — plus a computed aurora-visible latitude, so you get "aurora may be visible above ~54°N" instead of a bare number
• GOES X-ray flare class & NOAA R-scale — the same R1–R5 radio-blackout severity scale NOAA itself publishes, derived from live X-ray flux
• Active NOAA space weather alerts/watches/warnings — the official text bulletins, most recent first

Built for ham radio operators tracking HF propagation, aurora photographers/tourism operators planning by visibility latitude, and anyone who currently refreshes spaceweather.gov manually.

Input

{ "maxAlerts": 10 }

Field	Type	Description
maxAlerts	integer (default 10)	How many of the most recent NOAA alert/watch/warning messages to include.

Output

One record per run:

{
  "geomagnetic": {
    "kpIndex": 4,
    "observedAt": "2026-08-08T00:00:00",
    "auroraVisibleLatitude": 58.3
  },
  "radioBlackout": {
    "xrayFlux": 0.0000253,
    "flareClass": "M2.5",
    "observedAt": "2026-08-08T01:02:00Z",
    "rScale": "R1",
    "rScaleDescription": "Minor radio blackout"
  },
  "activeAlerts": [
    {
      "productId": "K04W",
      "issuedAt": "2026-08-04 08:10:52.687",
      "message": "Space Weather Message Code: WARK04\r\n..."
    }
  ],
  "fetchedAt": "2026-08-08T01:40:00.000Z"
}

How it works

Three direct calls to NOAA's own public JSON feeds — no scraping, no proxy, no key:

• Kp index: services.swpc.noaa.gov/products/noaa-planetary-k-index.json
• X-ray flux: services.swpc.noaa.gov/json/goes/primary/xrays-6-hour.json (the 0.1-0.8nm long channel, GOES's standard flare-classification band)
• Alerts: services.swpc.noaa.gov/products/alerts.json

R-scale thresholds and flare-class letters follow NOAA's own published definitions (see swpc.noaa.gov/noaa-scales-explanation). Aurora-visible latitude is a widely published approximate viewline table by Kp index — a planning signal, not a guarantee; local weather, light pollution, and time of night all matter too.

Pricing note

Billed per snapshot (one run = one charge), regardless of how many alerts are active. Cheap enough to schedule hourly for continuous monitoring without the cost multiplying with alert volume.

Related products

• US Weather Forecast & Alerts Tracker — ground-level NWS forecasts and alerts for a location
• Field Operations Risk Briefing — combines weather with GPS/radio conditions for field crews
• Earthquake Alert — a different hazard type (seismic activity) for the same kind of monitoring use case