Alerts
Access active NWS weather alerts for any location in the contiguous United States. Alerts are included in the unified weather response and also available individually by ID.
How alerts are exposed
Alerts surface in two complementary places:
- Embedded in the weather response. When you request weather for a location, any active alerts affecting that location come back inside the same response, so a single request can drive both your forecast UI and your alert banners.
- Individually by alert ID. Use the per-alert lookup to retrieve the full alert payload — description text, instruction text, and polygon geometry — for detail views, push-notification deep links, and social-share previews.
Alert content
Each alert carries the standard NWS metadata (sender, event type, onset and expiration timestamps), human-readable text fields, the list of affected counties, and a polygon geometry for map rendering.
Alert severity levels
SmarterWeather mirrors the NWS severity taxonomy without re-classifying. Use these directly to drive icon color and notification priority in your UI.
| Severity | Description |
|---|---|
| Extreme | Extraordinary threat to life or property |
| Severe | Significant threat to life or property |
| Moderate | Possible threat to life or property |
| Minor | Minimal threat to life or property |
Alerts reference
Coming with Phase 2. The alerts operations land in the canonical OpenAPI document during the Phase 2 implementation (issue #7258). Until then, see the REST API introduction for the resources already published.