Text products

Forecast discussions

Every NWS forecast office writes an Area Forecast Discussion several times a day: the human reasoning behind the forecast. Vertex ingests all of them within minutes, splits them into their sections, and serves them verbatim. One credit per document.

GET /v1/discussions/areas (free) → the office catalogue with names, markers and bounding boxes, plus a boundaryUrl for the county-warning-area polygons.

GET /v1/discussions/latest?bbox=w,s,e,n → the current discussion per office in the box, with freshness:

{ "publishedAt": "2026-09-19T15:04:00Z", "complete": true,
  "areas": [{ "id": "MSO", "name": "Missoula, MT", "issuedAt": "2026-09-19T14:41:00Z",
              "freshness": { "ingestState": "current", "ageState": "current" },
              "documentUrl": "/v1/discussions/MSO/latest" }] }

GET /v1/discussions/{cwa}/latest → the document:

{ "area": { "id": "MSO", "name": "Missoula, MT" },
  "product": { "id": "…", "issuedAt": "2026-09-19T14:41:00Z", "contentHash": "…" },
  "sections": [
    { "heading": "SHORT TERM", "text": "…" },
    { "heading": "LONG TERM", "text": "…" },
    { "heading": "AVIATION", "text": "…" }
  ] }

Text is exactly as issued. No model rewrites it. Products are retained for 30 days.

Alerts

GET /v1/weather-alerts?lat=46.87&lon=-113.99 → { status, checkedAt, alerts: [ … ] } with the official NWS alert features (headline, severity, onset, expires, description, instruction) that are active at that point. One credit.