MaverickWX
Data health

NWS Guide

Overview

What the National Weather Service publishes, what it means, and how the service itself is running right now.

The National Weather Service publishes almost everything. Almost none of it is labelled.

Two things live here: a plain-English tour of all 69 endpoints on the public weather API, and a translator for the messages the Senior Duty Meteorologist — the forecaster on watch over the whole national system — posts about how that system is running. Start with what you are trying to do.

What are you trying to do?

Get a forecast for a place Turn a latitude and longitude into a day-by-day or hourly forecast. You ask /points where a coordinate falls, and it hands you the forecast for that grid square. Forecasts → See active alerts and warnings Every watch, warning and advisory in effect right now, filterable by state, zone, severity and event type. Alerts → Check current conditions The latest observation from a station near you — temperature, wind, visibility and what the weather is doing at this moment. Observations → Read a forecast discussion The Area Forecast Discussion (AFD) is the forecaster explaining their own reasoning, in prose. It is one of several hundred text bulletins hiding under the JSON. Text-product codes → Follow how NWS itself is running The Senior Duty Meteorologist — the forecaster on watch over the national system — posts when a model run slips, a balloon launch is missed or a satellite is moved. We translate those. Operations messages → Understand how it all fits together Coordinates to grid squares to forecasts; which office covers where; why every request needs a User-Agent header. Read once, stop being confused. How it fits together →

NWS operations, right now

All SDM messages →

Critical Weather Day

Not declared

NWS is not currently restricting changes to its forecast systems.

Open operational notices

1 outstanding

Pairing is a heuristic — NWS messages carry no tracking ID.

Satellite sectors

3 active

  • GOES-East sector 1 about 65 mi ENE of Kansas City, MO until
  • GOES-East sector 2 about 55 mi SSE of Cleveland, OH until
  • GOES-West sector 2 Mexico, about 650 mi SW of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico until

3-day outlook

  • Wednesday None
  • Thursday None
  • Friday None

Latest operations messages

All operations messages →

Last checked .

Routine ADM Update On Brief Widespread Internet/Comms Outages Notices & outages Routine ADM Update On Brief Widespread Internet/Comms Outages Notices & outages Routine ADM Emergency IDP Application Failovers From Cprk To Boulder Notices & outages Routine ADM Emergency IDP Application Failovers From Cprk To Boulder Notices & outages Routine ADM 6 balloon reports flagged, 2 satellite sectors moved Notices & outagesBalloon reportsSatellite moves Routine ADM 37 balloon reports flagged Notices & outagesBalloon reports

If you are writing code

No key. No registration. One header.

Every request is a plain GET against https://api.weather.gov. The only rule: send a User-Agent that identifies you and gives them a way to make contact.

Read the User-Agent rule Browse endpoints