⛈️ NWS Active Alerts Scraper

🚀 Export NWS records in seconds. Pipe results straight into your spreadsheet, dashboard, or data warehouse.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-06-05 · 📊 12 fields per record · Public NWS data · Real-time updates

The NWS Active Alerts Scraper turns the National Weather Service active alerts API into a clean structured dataset of current US weather alerts. Filter by area, severity, urgency, and event type to focus on what matters.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
🚨 Emergency managers	Track every active US weather alert.
📰 Broadcasters	Power on-air weather alert tickers.
🏠 Insurance teams	Anticipate claims as severe weather develops.
✈️ Aviation ops	Adjust flight plans around weather.

📋 What the NWS Active Alerts Scraper does

• Fetches the public NWS feed at https://api.weather.gov/alerts/active.
• Parses the response and flattens each record into one structured row.
• Casts numeric values to numbers, dates to ISO strings.
• Surfaces upstream errors as a clean error record instead of crashing.
• Pushes everything to the dataset, ready for instant download.

💡 Why it matters: NWS publishes the data, but the raw response is awkward to work with. This actor normalizes everything into a flat schema that drops straight into pandas, BigQuery, or a Google Sheet.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon.

⚙️ Input

See the Input tab on the Apify console for the full list of supported filters. Every filter is optional. maxItems controls how many records are returned.

Example

{
  "maxItems": 50
}

⚠️ Good to Know. Free users are capped at 10 records per run as a preview. Paid users can pull up to 1,000,000 records.

📊 Output

Each record is a flat object. The error field is always last.

Field	Type	Description
🆔 id	string	NWS alert identifier.
⛈️ event	string	Event type.
⚠️ severity	string	Severity rating.
🚨 urgency	string	Urgency rating.
🎯 certainty	string	Certainty rating.
🗺️ area_desc	string	Affected area description.
📤 sent	string	When the alert was sent.
🕒 effective	string	Effective time.
🕒 expires	string	Expiry time.
📰 headline	string	Alert headline.
📋 instruction	string	Recommended action.
🗺️ geocode	object	SAME and UGC geocodes.
🕒 scrapedAt	string	When this row was fetched.
❌ error	string	Set if the upstream response was an error.

✨ Why choose this Actor

| 🆓 | Works with the free Apify plan (10-record preview). | | 🧹 | Clean snake_case keys ready for BI tools. | | 🔢 | Auto-casts numeric and date fields. | | 🛟 | Surfaces upstream errors as a clean record. | | 💾 | Push to dataset and download in any supported format. |

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Setup time	Clean keys	Numeric casting	Error handling
Roll your own fetch	30 min +	No	No	No
This Actor	5 sec, no install	Yes	Yes	Yes

🚀 How to use

1. Click Try for free.
2. Adjust the input filters or leave defaults.
3. Click Start. Within seconds, your dataset is ready.

💼 Business use cases

🚨 Live alert feeds. Refresh every few minutes for an always-current feed of US severe weather.

📰 Broadcast graphics. Drive an on-air ticker straight from NWS data.

🏠 Insurance triage. Pre-position claims teams ahead of severe storms.

✈️ Flight ops. Monitor active aviation-impacting alerts.

🔌 Automating NWS Active Alerts Scraper

• Make / Zapier. Trigger this actor on a schedule, push results to Airtable, Slack, or your CRM.
• Cron schedule. Apify's native scheduler runs this on whatever cadence you need.
• Webhooks. Get a POST to your endpoint the moment a run finishes.
• Pipe to your warehouse. Native Apify integrations move datasets straight into BigQuery, Snowflake, or Postgres.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

🎓 Education. Use real public data for classroom projects.

🧪 Personal research. Build your own dashboards and notebooks.

🤝 Non-profit & open data. Power public dashboards without writing client code.

🧰 Tinkering & prototyping. Spin up a fresh data feed in seconds.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Pop this README into ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI assistant and ask it to map your specific workflow to the actor's inputs.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

❓ Is the data free? Yes. NWS publishes the API openly.

❓ How fresh is the data? NWS updates alerts in real time.

❓ Does this need an API key? No, but NWS requires a User-Agent header which this actor sets.

❓ Can I filter by state? Yes, use the Area input.

❓ What event types are supported? All NWS event types including Tornado Warning, Flash Flood Warning, Winter Storm Watch, Heat Advisory, and more.

❓ Will the schema change? Core fields follow the NWS API specification.

❓ Is this scraping or API? API. NWS publishes a documented REST endpoint.

❓ Can I schedule runs? Yes via Apify's scheduler.

❓ Does it include marine and tropical? Yes. The active alerts feed covers all NWS products.

❓ What about the polygon shape? The geocode field carries SAME and UGC codes for downstream mapping.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Apify ships native integrations with Make, Zapier, Slack, Discord, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Gmail, Airbyte, Keboola, Telegram, GitHub, and any REST API or webhook endpoint.

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