Monitor Severe Weather Alerts by State

A national weather feed is noisy when a team operates in only a few states. Regional monitoring becomes more useful when alerts are scoped to facilities, routes, staff, or customers and routed according to severity and urgency. The NWS Weather Alerts Scraper accepts multiple state and territory codes while keeping the official affected-area description.

Separate collection from routing

Measure the monitor itself: last successful collection, areas queried, alert count, newest effective time, and upstream errors. An operational dashboard should make stale data obvious. That health panel prevents a broken pipeline from looking like a reassuring absence of severe weather.

{"areaCodes":["CA","OR","WA"],"severities":["Extreme","Severe","Moderate"],"maxResultsPerArea":100}

Collect a defensible range of alerts first, then apply business rules downstream. A distribution center might route flood and winter storm warnings to logistics, red flag warnings to safety, and heat advisories to workforce operations. The NWS event, severity, urgency, and certainty fields should remain separate columns; collapsing them into one score loses important context.

Use alert ID as the stable key and compare effective, onset, expiry, and end times on every refresh. An existing alert can be extended or updated without becoming a completely new operational issue. Store the full description and instruction even if notifications show only the headline.

Avoid treating an empty response as proof of safe conditions. First confirm the Actor run succeeded, the requested codes were valid, and the upstream feed was reachable. Maintain official phone, radio, and local emergency channels for critical decisions. The automated dataset is most valuable for triage, historical analysis, and consistent routing—not as an independent weather authority.