juliensimon/swpc-alerts

NOAA SWPC Space Weather Alerts

Credit: NASA

Part of the Space Weather Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

Official space weather alerts from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, spanning 2026-03-11 to 2026-04-10. Currently 200 alerts.

Dataset description

This dataset contains official space weather alerts, watches, and warnings issued by NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). These notifications cover:

• Geomagnetic storms: G1 (minor) through G5 (extreme) storms from CME impacts
• Solar radiation storms: S1 through S5 proton events
• Radio blackouts: R1 through R5 HF radio absorption events
• Watches and warnings: advance notice of expected space weather impacts

These alerts are critical for satellite operators, power grid managers, aviation, and anyone affected by space weather.

SWPC operates as the United States' official source for space weather forecasts and warnings, analogous to the National Weather Service for terrestrial weather. The alert system follows a structured hierarchy: watches are issued 1-3 days in advance when conditions favor a significant event (e.g., an Earth-directed CME has been observed), warnings indicate that an event is imminent or already in progress (e.g., a geomagnetic storm threshold has been crossed), and alerts notify when specific thresholds are exceeded in real-time. Summaries provide post-event documentation. Each alert references the NOAA scales: G1-G5 for geomagnetic storms (based on Kp), S1-S5 for solar radiation storms (based on >10 MeV proton flux), and R1-R5 for radio blackouts (based on X-ray flare class).

The alert messages contain rich unstructured information beyond what numeric indices capture: analyst assessments of CME morphology, expected arrival windows, confidence levels, affected sectors (HF radio, GPS, power systems, satellite operations, aviation radiation), and references to specific active regions responsible for the activity. This makes the dataset valuable for natural language processing research, including text classification of alert severity, named entity recognition of solar features, and temporal relation extraction linking warnings to subsequent observed impacts.

From an operational standpoint, these alerts drive real-world responses: satellite operators may postpone maneuvers during geomagnetic storm warnings, airlines reroute polar flights during solar radiation storms to reduce crew radiation exposure, and power grid operators increase reactive power reserves when G3+ storms are forecast. The timestamp and type distribution in this dataset reflects the cadence of space weather operations and can be correlated with the numeric index datasets (Kp, Dst, solar wind) to study forecast accuracy and lead times.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
product_id	string	SWPC product identifier
issue_datetime	datetime	Date and time the alert was issued (UTC)
message	string	Full alert message text
alert_type	string	Extracted type: ALERT, WARNING, WATCH, SUMMARY, or OTHER

Quick stats

• 200 alerts (2026-03-11 to 2026-04-10)
• By type:
  • ALERT: 101
  • SUMMARY: 10
  • WARNING: 71
  • WATCH: 18

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/swpc-alerts", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Recent warnings
warnings = df[df["alert_type"] == "WARNING"].sort_values("issue_datetime", ascending=False)
print(warnings[["issue_datetime", "product_id"]].head(10))

# Geomagnetic storm alerts
geo = df[df["message"].str.contains("Geomagnetic Storm", case=False, na=False)]
print(f"Geomagnetic storm alerts: {len(geo)}")

Data source

NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) alerts API.

Update schedule

Daily at 15:00 UTC via GitHub Actions.

Pipeline

Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets

Support

If you find this dataset useful, please give it a ❤️ on the dataset page and share feedback in the Community tab! Also consider giving a ⭐️ to the space-datasets repo.

Citation

@dataset{swpc_alerts,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {NOAA SWPC Space Weather Alerts},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/swpc-alerts},
  note = {Based on NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center alerts data}
}

License

CC-BY-4.0