Overview#
When a tornado warning is issued for a county where your agency has resources deployed and a shelter-in-place advisory active, the response depends entirely on how fast you can correlate the warning with your current operational picture. Natural hazards monitoring brings that correlation into a single platform: the weather alert lands, the affected zone is mapped against deployed resources and active incidents, and the right people are notified in seconds rather than minutes.
Argus Natural Hazards Monitoring provides real-time monitoring and alerting for natural disasters and environmental hazards. The system integrates with seismic networks, weather services, and hazard databases to deliver timely alerts and situational awareness for emergency response operations. Whether the threat is an approaching hurricane, a flash flood in an active incident zone, or a wildfire near a critical facility, the platform maintains continuous awareness and feeds that awareness directly into operational decision-making.
Open Standards#
- OASIS Common Alerting Protocol v1.2 (CAP v1.2): Weather and hazard alerts sourced from NOAA NWS, Environment Canada, and equivalent national meteorological authorities are ingested and validated against the CAP v1.2 message schema, covering mandatory fields (identifier, sender, status, msgType, scope) before mapping into platform entities.
- USGS FDSN Web Services (fdsnws/event/1/): Earthquake data is retrieved via the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN) event web-service protocol, both for real-time hourly feeds and historical backfill queries with parametric filtering (magnitude, bounding box, time window).
- GeoJSON (RFC 7946): Earthquake events are consumed directly from the USGS GeoJSON feed format, and impact-zone geofences are generated as GeoJSON Feature objects with Point geometry, keeping all spatial representations in the standard interchange format.
- WGS-84 (EPSG:4326): All geographic coordinates, earthquake epicentres, geofence centroids, and impact-radius boundaries, are stored and exchanged in WGS-84 decimal-degree form, the geodetic datum underpinning FDSN feeds and GeoJSON.
- GraphQL: The module exposes its queries (list earthquakes, fetch event, monitoring statistics) and mutations (trigger backfill, acknowledge recommendation) through a GraphQL API, enabling typed, self-describing access from client applications.
- OAuth 2.0 / JWT (RFC 6749 / RFC 7519): All API endpoints for this module are protected by JWT bearer tokens issued via the platform's OAuth 2.0 authorisation server, enforced through the IsAuthenticated permission class on every resolver.
- JSON (ECMA-404 / RFC 8259): Hazard metadata, geofence definitions, prepositioning recommendations, and contributing-factor payloads are serialised as JSON and stored in PostgreSQL JSONB columns, with JSON also used as the wire format for upstream feed responses.
Last Reviewed: 2026-02-05 Last Updated: 2026-04-14
Key Features#
- Earthquake Monitoring: Real-time seismic data tracking with magnitude and depth analysis, aftershock prediction, impact zone mapping, and building damage assessment.
- Weather Hazards: Severe storm tracking, tornado warnings, hurricane path monitoring, flash flood alerts, and winter storm detection with real-time updates.
- Environmental Hazards: Wildfire detection, air quality monitoring, volcanic activity tracking, tsunami warnings, and drought condition assessment.
- Alert Management: Multi-channel notifications with customisable magnitude and severity thresholds, geographic filtering, escalation rules, and historical comparison.
- Risk Assessment: Location-based hazard evaluation covering earthquake risk, flood zone analysis, wildfire exposure, and historical activity patterns.
- Multi-Source Data Integration: Aggregation from USGS, National Weather Service, NOAA Storm Prediction Center, National Hurricane Center, NIFC InciWeb, and regional monitoring networks.
Use Cases#
- Earthquake Response: Receive real-time earthquake alerts, assess magnitude and location, identify affected areas, coordinate response resources, and track aftershock activity.
- Severe Weather Operations: Monitor approaching storms, issue community warnings, pre-position resources, track damage reports, and coordinate evacuations.
- Wildfire Management: Detect fire starts, track fire spread, monitor air quality, coordinate evacuations, and support suppression efforts with real-time data.
- Flood Preparedness: Monitor rainfall rates, track river levels, assess flood zone risk, and coordinate evacuation and resource deployment for affected areas.
- Multi-Hazard Situational Awareness: Maintain continuous monitoring across all hazard types with unified alerting and response coordination through a single platform.
Integration#
The module connects with USGS ShakeAlert, National Weather Service, NOAA, National Hurricane Center, NIFC InciWeb, CAL FIRE, satellite detection systems, and regional monitoring networks. Integrates with alert management, geospatial analysis, incident management, and notification delivery systems within the Argus platform.