Reference
Methodology
Sources, licences, scale mappings, and exactly how this section handles the difference between "no warnings" and "no data".
The rule that runs through all of this
Absence of data is never "no warnings". Every status block on this site renders exactly one of three states: ACTIVE (a list), NONE REPORTED (the source was fetched successfully, inside its freshness window, and returned zero), or NO DATA (the source was not fetched, is stale, or failed). There is no fourth state, and none of them is ever inferred. A cache miss is not a clear sky.
Sources and licence mode
Live means a poller reads the feed and the page shows its state. Summary and link means we publish an editorial summary and a deep link to the issuer instead of mirroring its feed.
| Source | Country | Mode | Freshness | Licence note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NOAA/NWS National Weather Service | US | live layer — its current state is on feed status | 30 min | US Government work, public domain. Requires a descriptive User-Agent with a monitored contact. |
| NOAA/National Hurricane Center | US | registered; no adapter in this section yet | — | US Government work, public domain. |
| NOAA/Storm Prediction Center | US | registered; no adapter in this section yet | — | US Government work, public domain. |
| Every other national agency | — | summary + link | — | Our choice until each issuer's reuse terms have been read — not a claim that any issuer forbids reuse. |
| Meteoalarm, WMO Severe Weather Information Centre | — | summary + link | — | Aggregators. The warnings they carry belong to the national services, which are always credited as the issuer. |
The full registry, including every agency cited by the census, is in workers/hurritrack-warnings/migrations/0002_seed_sources.sql. Any source not listed as live defaults to summary-only; a feed cannot become live by omission.
Scale mapping
National warning scales are not comparable. Spain's rojo, France's rouge and the UK's red are three different tiers with three different thresholds. This section never merges them. Every warning is shown as native label (CAP severity) — the agency's own word first, the Common Alerting Protocol mapping in parentheses — and a colour is never used without its text label beside it.
The CAP severity values used here are Extreme, Severe, Moderate, Minor and Unknown. When a source supplies no CAP value the severity is Unknown, never Severe and never Moderate: a missing value is missing information, not a middling hazard.
Editorial QA process
- The pipeline drops the day's markdown at
census/YYYY-MM-DD.mdand optionally a JSON sidecar atcensus/YYYY-MM-DD.json. - Ingest parses the report, archives it, and creates a census run with
page_status: draft. - A census day's alerts are upserted only from its JSON sidecar. The prose is never parsed into database rows — a model reading the narrative would manufacture warnings no agency issued.
- If the sidecar is missing, the markdown is archived, the run is flagged, and no alerts are created.
- If any part of the parse is uncertain, the run is marked
needs_reviewwith a reason. - An editor checks the day against the issuers, then publishes it by recording their name and the time in the publication manifest. Nothing is published by default.
Times
Every time on this site is shown in UTC and in the location's local time with its zone abbreviation, computed from an IANA zone identifier at render time. No fixed UTC offsets are stored or written, because an offset is wrong twice a year. Where a location spans multiple zones and the specific one cannot be determined, the local time is omitted rather than guessed.