One of the most common needs and use of weather information is to stay on top of breaking severe weather events. In a previous post, we explored using the NWS API to retrieve the current forecast for a specific location. Let’s walk through how you would retrieve any active weather alerts for your area.

Although Python might be a 30-year-old programming language, it’s an easy language to adopt, provides a lot of capability through external libraries, and is supported on major operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. Likewise, there are plenty of weather data sources to retrieve information like current conditions, forecasts, and severe weather alerts. The National Weather Service (NWS) API allows developers access to critical forecasts, alerts, observations, and other weather data. The API was designed with a cache-friendly approach that expires content based on the information lifecycle. All the information available via the API is open data and free to use.