California Watches & Warnings

This is the National Weather Service's active alerts feed, filtered to California — every watch, warning, advisory and statement in force in the state and its coastal waters — read from api.weather.gov every five minutes. It is the same feed weather.gov's own map draws from; the text of each product is shown exactly as the issuing office wrote it, whether that office is Eureka, Sacramento, the Bay Area, Hanford, Los Angeles/Oxnard, San Diego, or one of the neighbouring offices whose zones reach into the state.

Colours are the NWS's own. The hazard colour table is a convention forecasters and the public have shared for years — a red polygon is a Tornado Warning, orange a Severe Thunderstorm Warning, pink a Winter Storm Warning — and that literacy carries straight over. Where alerts overlap, the more significant one is drawn on top.

Two kinds of polygon. The storm-based warnings — tornado, severe thunderstorm, flash flood, special marine — are drawn by a forecaster around the storm itself, and those polygons are shown as issued. Everything else is issued against zones: counties, NWS forecast zones, fire zones and marine zones. The feed carries only the zone codes for those, so this site assembles the outline from the zone geometry — which is why a Heat Advisory follows county lines and a Small Craft Advisory follows the coast. Each product says which kind it is.

The corner readout shows how old the file is. It turns red past twenty minutes, which means the ingest has missed several passes and the map is no longer current — check the source directly.

Golden State Weather is not an official source and this page is not a substitute for an alerting service. For watches, warnings and advisories the authority is always weather.gov and your local NWS office; for life-safety warnings, a NOAA Weather Radio or Wireless Emergency Alerts on your phone.