About this site

What this is

An unofficial, educational site that makes National Weather Service data infrastructure legible to people who do not work at NWS. It is not a forecast site and it does not show watches or warnings.

What this is not

Not affiliated with NOAA or the National Weather Service. Nothing here is official. Do not use this site for any life-safety decision. For forecasts and warnings use weather.gov or your local emergency management agency. For official NWS operational status use the NCO status page.

Where the data comes from

• SDM messages — product codes ADM and ADA issued by SDM, read from api.weather.gov/products/types/{ADM,ADA}/locations/SDM. These are the same messages shown on the NCO status page, pulled as structured JSON rather than scraped.
• API catalog — the OpenAPI specification the API publishes about itself at api.weather.gov/openapi.json, refreshed daily. The spec ships with empty descriptions, so every plain-English explanation on this site was written by hand.
• Upper-air station names — NOAA/NCEI Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA v2) station metadata.

How it stays polite

Page loads never hit api.weather.gov. Scheduled jobs fetch upstream every 10 minutes (SDM messages) and once a day (the API catalog), and store results in Cloudflare KV; the site reads only from there. Every upstream request carries an identifying User-Agent with a contact address, as NWS asks. Failed fetches back off with jitter, and if upstream is down we keep serving the last good copy with the age shown.

The one exception is the “try it” panel, which proxies a live request on your behalf. That proxy accepts only allowlisted GET paths and is rate-limited per client.

On honesty

Translation involves judgement, and we would rather be visibly uncertain than quietly wrong. Every card keeps the original message one click away. Where a numeric status code has no published meaning we label it unrecognised instead of inventing one. Where a summary was written by an AI model rather than our parser, the card says so.

Current data

• Messages on file: 213
• Last fetch attempt: 2026-08-22T23:40:23.483Z
• Last successful fetch: 2026-08-22T23:40:23.483Z
• API endpoints catalogued: 69
• Catalog last built: 2026-08-22T09:12:11.718Z