Experimental SPC Products RSS Feeds

Storm Prediction Center is providing tornado/severe thunderstorm watches, mesoscale discussions, convective day 1-3 outlooks and fire weather outlooks through RSS. This page is a brief summary of RSS, what it does and how you can use it. This is an experimental product of the National Weather Service. Comments and feedback are welcome. Information regarding the Use of NWS RSS can be found here.

What is RSS?

RSS has several meanings: Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, and RDF Site Summary where RDF in turn stands for Resource Data Framework. In any case it is a method of summarizing the latest news and information from a website in a lightweight form that can be easily read by any of a number of news readers or news aggregators. The idea is to give users the ability to quickly obtain the latest news and updates from a site in a headline or news digest format. This in turn helps during high-traffic periods by reducing the load on the servers.

What do I need to use the RSS feeds?

To use our RSS feeds, you need a feed reader or news aggregator installed on your computer. These are applications that can be set to read the feeds on a recurring basis, generally once an hour or so. For more information on downloading an RSS reader, click here.

Once you have installed a feed reader or news aggregator, you simply add the SPC feed address to the list of feeds in the reader. The installation instructions for the readers will help you with that. If your newsreader or aggregator uses "auto-discovery" then simply enter the main SPC address (http://www.spc.noaa.gov/) and it will find the feed.

What is the feed address?

The URLs for the SPC RSS Feeds are:

  • For tornado/severe thunderstorm watches, mesoscale discussions, convective outlooks, fire weather outlooks:
    XML logo http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcrss.xml

  • For tornado/severe thunderstorm watches and watch status reports only:
    XML logo http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcwwrss.xml

  • For Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS) tornado/severe thunderstorm watches only:
    XML logo http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcpdswwrss.xml

  • For mesoscale discussions only:
    XML logo http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcmdrss.xml
  • For convective outlooks only:
    XML logo http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcacrss.xml
  • For experimental public severe weather outlook multimedia briefings only:
    XML logo http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcmbrss.xml
  • For fire weather forecasts only:
    XML logo http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcfwrss.xml

    What version of RSS do you use?

    At the present time our feed use the RSS 2.0 specification.

    What products are covered in your RSS feed?

    The SPC RSS feed is updated whenever one or more of the following products were issued by the Storm Preduction Center.

  • Tornado/severe thunderstorm watch: watch number and the link to the watch page and watch status page if issued.
  • Mesoscale discussion: MD number and the link to the MD page.
  • Convective Day 1,2,3 & 4-8 outlooks: valid date and time of the outlook and the link to the outlook product page.
  • Fire weather Day 1,2 & 3-8 outlook: valid date and time of the fire weather outlook and link to the fire weather page.

    Why is the XML logo on the page?

    The XML logo and the RSS logo are both currently in use across the Internet to indicate to users the availability of RSS feeds from the site. XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language, and is the basic lingo of the RSS technology. We simply decided to display both logos.

    Got More Questions?

    If you have problems, questions, or feedback regarding the RSS feeds, please send them to spc.feedback@noaa.gov or visit the SPC feedback page here.