Hazard Alerts

AlphaGeo’s Hazard Alerts monitors your asset portfolio for hazards happening now and forecast over the next seven days, anywhere in the world. It continuously aggregates authoritative public hazard feeds and matches them to each asset, presenting the result as a single map, alert list, and asset-by-hazard summary.

Where the Climate Risk and Resilience Index (CRRI) measures a location’s long-term, modelled climate risk, Nowcasting answers the operational question alongside it: what is affecting my assets today, and what is coming this week?

Both use the same nine hazard categories, so the live picture lines up directly with the underlying risk profile.

Our approach: Live hazard monitoring

Traditional climate risk models look decades into the future. They tell you how much risk a location carries over its lifetime — but not whether a storm is bearing down on it this week.

Real-time Hazard Nowcasting closes that gap. It draws on established government and scientific hazard feeds, matches each event to the assets it affects, and produces two complementary views:

1. Active hazards — events that monitoring networks have already detected and that are affecting an asset now.

2. Forecasted hazards — events expected at an asset over the next seven days, shown with how many days ahead the peak is expected.

Hazard categories

Nowcasting tracks the same nine acute and chronic hazard categories as the CRRI:

• Heat Stress: Dangerously high temperatures that pose health risks to people and assets.

• Inland Flooding: Overflowing rivers, flash floods, and surface-water inundation, including river-discharge surges.

• Coastal Flooding: Storm surge, tidal flooding, and tsunami inundation affecting coastal areas.

• Wildfire: Active fire and extreme fire-weather conditions, detected from satellite hotspots and fire warnings.

• High Wind: Damaging winds from windstorms, tropical cyclones, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms.

• Drought: Prolonged precipitation deficit causing water stress.

• Hail: Large hail, ice storms, and severe winter weather.

• Earthquake: Ground shaking from seismic events, and related ground failure.

• Landslide: Slope failure, debris flow, and mudslide risk.

AlphaGeo presents alerts using four operational categories: Minor, Moderate, Severe, and Extreme. Provider classifications are retained for traceability and mapped into these categories where available; forecast signals without a provider classification use AlphaGeo screening priorities. These categories support triage, are not universal measures of physical intensity or damage, and do not affect CRRI scores.

How alerts are matched to assets

Each asset's coordinates are checked against the alert sources. Depending on the source, AlphaGeo queries the provider at that coordinate, checks whether the coordinate falls inside a published alert area or forecast cone, or matches the asset's place name to a published warning area. Where a source reports an event as a point, a proximity buffer around that point is used instead.

Point-event source	Proximity buffer
NASA FIRMS	An active-fire hotspot must be within 5 km of the asset.
USGS earthquakes	The radius increases with magnitude: 100 km for M4.0–4.9, 200 km for M5.0–5.9, 400 km for M6.0–6.9, 800 km for M7.0–7.4, and 1,200 km for M7.5+.
GDACS events	A radius set by event type (for example, wider for tropical cyclones than for floods or wildfires), widened for Red alerts and narrowed for Green alerts.

These radii are conservative screening areas for associating an event with an asset; they are not estimates of asset damage.

For earthquakes of magnitude 5.5 and above, the radius is only a first screen. Where USGS publishes ShakeMap intensity contours, each asset's category is then set from the modelled shaking intensity at its location, so assets near a large event can receive different categories.

Data sources

As with the rest of the AlphaGeo platform, sources are selected for being authoritative, well-documented, and widely trusted in the field. Nowcasting aggregates the following openly published hazard feeds:

Source	Provider	What it brings
NWS Alerts	NOAA — US National Weather Service	Official US weather warnings and watches
Hurricane Tracks	NOAA — National Hurricane Center	Tropical cyclone forecast cones
Tropical Cyclones	JTWC — Joint Typhoon Warning Center	Forecast tracks for the Pacific and Indian Ocean basins
Storm Surge	Open-Meteo Marine	Forecast sea level against the recent high-water range
Weather Forecast	Open-Meteo	7-day heat, wind, and rainfall outlook
Flood Forecast	Open-Meteo / GloFAS	River-flood (discharge) outlook
Earthquakes	USGS	Global earthquake monitoring
Multi-hazard Alerts	GDACS (UN / EU)	Global disaster alerts across hazard types
Active Fires	NASA FIRMS	Satellite-detected wildfire hotspots
European Alerts	Meteoalarm	National meteorological-service warnings (Europe)
Public Alerts	Google Public Alerts	Government public-safety alerts where available

What you see

The dashboard has three connected panels:

• Risk Nowcasts — an alert list grouped by hazard, showing the headline, affected assets, source, and severity. Active events are listed ahead of forecast ones.

• Asset Map — an interactive world map with assets as pins and hazard areas drawn as coloured layers. Pin colour shows status at a glance: red for an active hazard, yellow for a forecast hazard, and grey for no current hazard.

• Asset–Hazard Table — a grid of assets against the nine hazard categories, showing the most severe alert for each combination.

Data details

• Coverage: Global, with added depth in the United States (NWS) and participating European countries (Meteoalarm).

• Active hazards: Observed within the last 24 hours to 7 days, depending on the source.

• Forecast horizon: Up to 7 days ahead.

• Refresh: On demand — each source reflects its provider’s latest published data.

The table below shows the time window each source contributes:

Hazard signal	Source	Looks at
US weather warnings	NWS	Current / active
Earthquakes	USGS	Last 24 hours
Active fires	NASA FIRMS	Last 24 hours
Global disaster alerts	GDACS	Last 7 days
European warnings	Meteoalarm	Current / active
Public alerts	Google	Current / active
Heat, wind & rainfall	Open-Meteo	Next 7 days (forecast)
River flooding	Open-Meteo / GloFAS	Next 7 days (forecast)
Hurricane tracks	NOAA NHC	Forecast cone (~5 days)
Tropical cyclones	JTWC	Forecast track (~5 days)
Storm surge	Open-Meteo Marine	Next 7 days (forecast)

Use cases

• Operational monitoring of asset portfolios for live and emerging hazards

• Early warning and preparedness for forecast events in the week ahead

• Situational awareness during active disasters across multiple regions

• Pairing live conditions with CRRI scores for context-aware decisions

Limitations

We document limitations explicitly so users can interpret the nowcast with appropriate context.

• Forecasts are planning aids, not guarantees. Confidence decreases with lead time — a hazard flagged for tomorrow is far more reliable than one flagged six or seven days out. Treat distant forecasts as early signals to watch rather than firm predictions.

• Forecasts change between updates. As new data arrives, an event may grow, shrink, shift, or drop off entirely. The view always reflects the latest available outlook.

• Active alerts are observations. Hazards on the "now" side reflect what monitoring networks have actually detected, not a prediction.

• Alert categories are indicative. AlphaGeo's operational categories support triage; they are not directly comparable measures of physical intensity across every hazard and are not precise damage estimates. For modelled, asset-specific impact, use the CRRI.

• A hurricane forecast cone is not a wind footprint. The NHC cone represents uncertainty in the cyclone centre track, not the full area of damaging wind. Cone matching is an operational screening signal rather than a complete impact estimate.

• Coverage depends on source feeds. Some hazards are strongest in specific regions — NWS alerts cover the United States, and Meteoalarm covers participating European countries — while sources such as USGS, GDACS, NASA FIRMS, and Open-Meteo provide global coverage.