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NOAA Weather Alerts → TAK

Polls the NOAA National Weather Service active-alerts API and emits one CoT polygon per alert. Severe thunderstorms, tornado warnings, flash flood warnings, etc., show on the TAK map as shaded areas with the alert's full text in the marker inspector.

Read the Flows overview first

Import the GeoJSON to CoT subflow before importing this flow.

What it emits

  • One CoT drawing event (u-d-f) per active alert polygon:
    • Vertices — the alert's polygon ring, as <link> entries.
    • Center marker — polygon centroid.
    • Callsign — alert event (e.g., Tornado Warning).
    • Remarks — headline, area description, severity/certainty, sent/expires timestamps, truncated description and instruction text.
  • UID — noaa-<alert-id> — stable across polls.
  • Stale — 1 hour from emission. NWS alerts typically expire within an hour; set your own stale if you poll less often.

Poll interval defaults to 2 minutes. NWS alerts update in near-real-time, so this is a reasonable cadence for operational use.

Filter

Default URL:

https://api.weather.gov/alerts/active?status=actual&severity=Severe,Extreme

Without a severity filter the full-US feed can exceed a thousand active alerts. Adjust the URL in the NOAA feed URL change node:

  • By state: ?area=TX (two-letter code, any US state/territory).
  • By point: ?point=39.7,-104.99 (lat,lon — returns alerts affecting that location).
  • By zone: ?zone=TXC141 (NWS forecast zone code).
  • Combine filters: ?area=TX&severity=Severe,Extreme.

Full query vocabulary: https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api.

Install

Before you start

1. Import

Node-RED → ☰ → Import → Local → fasttak → noaa-weather → Import.

2. Configure TLS

☰ → Configuration nodes → NOAA Server TLS → "Use key or certificate from local file" → replace {svc_user} → Update.

3. Set your User-Agent

NOAA requires a unique User-Agent with contact info (see their ToS). Open the Fetch feed http-request node, scroll to Headers, and change the User-Agent value from:

FastTAK/1.0 (contact@example.com)

to something that identifies your deployment:

FastTAK/1.0 (sar-ops@yourorg.example)

NOAA may rate-limit or block calls without a real contact email.

4. Tune filter and deploy

Edit the URL in NOAA feed URL for your AO, then Deploy.

Alerts without polygons

Some NWS alerts reference a forecast zone rather than a specific polygon. Those come back with geometry: null and are dropped by the Transform node — they can't be plotted on a map. If you need them as area-based markers, extend the transform to look up zone geometry from https://api.weather.gov/zones/forecast/<zone-id> or emit a point marker at the alert's centroid from properties.parameters.SAME codes.

Verify

docker compose logs -f nodered | grep -iE 'noaa|weather|http request'

Watch for HTTP 200 responses from api.weather.gov. An HTTP 403 usually means your User-Agent wasn't accepted — check the header.

Files

  • nodered/flows-library/noaa-weather.json