Severe weather on the city website
Every 15 minutes, severe or extreme alerts for your state are posted as website alerts in Sentra CMS.
Open data & public infoConnector
National Weather Service alerts integration
for cities
The National Weather Service publishes active watches, warnings and advisories through api.weather.gov. It is free, needs no key, and is the source most local emergency notices start from.
Plain API
National Weather Service alerts
- Tier
- Plain API
- Category
- Open data & public info
- Sign-in
- No sign-in needed
- Paging
- single response
§ Overview
What connecting Weather Service does.
SentraBridge reads active alerts for a state or forecast zone and filters them by severity and event type. Flows can post a website alert, message staff or text a list of contacts. Alerts are read fresh each run and not kept.
- Active alerts: Watches, warnings and advisories for a state or forecast zone.
- Severity and urgency: Fields to filter on, such as Severe or Extreme.
- Alert text: Headline, areas, description, instructions and effective time.
What SentraBridge can do with National Weather Service alerts
| resource | read | write | changes only | fields |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active alerts | list | — | — | Event, Headline, Severity, Urgency, Areas, Description… |
§ Use cases
What cities connect Weather Service for.
Heads-up for public works
Flood and winter storm warnings for the city's zone are posted to the public works Teams channel.
Texts to on-call staff
Extreme heat or tornado warnings send an SMS through Twilio to the on-call list.
Keep a log for after-action reports
Each alert's headline and times are written to a database table the emergency manager uses for reports.
§ Examples
Flows that use National Weather Service alerts.
§ How it works
How to connect Weather Service
- 01Get accessNo account or key is needed.
- 02Add the connectionAdd a User-Agent header with your city's contact email, as the NWS asks.
- 03Preview real recordsSet your state or forecast zone in the connection.
- 04Turn it onFilter by severity, like Severe and Extreme, and preview.
§ Often connected with
Weather Service and the rest of city hall.
Systems cities commonly connect with Weather Service, each with its own connector page.
§ FAQ
Weather Service integration questions
Is api.weather.gov free?
Yes. The National Weather Service API is free and needs no key. It asks for a User-Agent header with contact details.
How do I post weather alerts on our website automatically?
Read active alerts for your state or zone every 15 minutes, keep severe and extreme ones, and create an alert in Sentra CMS. A template for this flow exists.
Will the same alert be posted twice?
A Remove duplicates step or a check against the website's alerts keeps one post per alert ID.
§ Next
Related connectors
Connect National Weather Service… to the rest.
We'll set up a workspace with your systems in a sandbox and build your first flow with you.