How AreaZine is made

The records

The agencies publish their notices for people to act on now; AreaZine keeps them afterwards, so that a place's record and a warning type's history can be read in one place. Where an agency publishes a complete archive (the NWS through the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, FEMA through OpenFEMA, the Environment Agency through its history file), counts come from that archive. Where it does not, counts come from AreaZine's own record of the live feed, and every such count says from which date the record is kept.

How a notice becomes a page

The pipeline stores each record exactly as the agency sent it. A notice gets a page only if its record meets a data contract: an NWS product needs a VTEC code, an area and a time; a New South Wales incident must be a vegetation fire, a hazard reduction or a burn-off (road crashes, alarms and structure fires are not published); an earthquake must come from its country's own agency (the USGS for the U.S., Earthquakes Canada, Geoscience Australia, the British Geological Survey) at magnitude 2.5 or more (1.5 in the U.K.); a flood notice needs an Environment Agency flood area; a recall needs a product, a date and the agency's page. The title and the first sentence are built from the record's own fields by fixed templates, and the agency's message is quoted as sent. Messages about people, such as child abduction or law enforcement alerts, are never published.

How we count

A National Weather Service product is counted by its VTEC event (office, phenomenon, significance and event number), in the month it was first issued. A warning that covers two states counts once in each state and once in the national total. Yearly averages use 2008 to the last complete year, because the archive holds fewer events for several products in 2005 to 2007, while VTEC coding was still being introduced. This year's count is compared with the same months of earlier years, through the last complete month; a month counts as complete from its 28th day, so the last day or two may be missing from this year's figure. FEMA declarations are counted by declaration date and number; one number can cover many counties. Environment Agency counts include flood alerts, flood warnings and severe flood warnings and leave out updates and the old "flood watch" level.

The checks that run

Each load compares what it read with what the agency's file says it holds, and a rebuild that would lose records it cannot restore stops. The pipeline refreshes what agencies revise: FEMA adds counties and programs to a declaration after the first day, and the USGS reviews an automatic earthquake solution and often changes its magnitude and felt reports, so those records are read again and the page shows the current value. Records whose source stops answering are flagged in the logs rather than shown as zero. Automated tests check the counting rules against samples of the source files. On 30 September 2026 a separate recount script checked 15 figures against the raw files and live catalogues, all equal: Colorado's and Texas's NWS warnings of 2026, the national red flag warnings of 2025 and the averages of 2008-2016 and 2017-2025, Oklahoma's tornado warnings of 2025, the national and Texas tornado watches of 2025 (one per Storm Prediction Center number), FEMA's declarations of 2025 and of 2026 to date and the major disasters among them, a flood area's alerts in the Environment Agency's history, a notice's event number, the U.K. earthquakes of 2026 and those of June 2026 in the British Geological Survey's database.

Licences: what is quoted and what is not

AreaZine's own counts and tables are published under CC BY 4.0. Each agency's record keeps its licence, and a notice page quotes an agency's text only where that licence allows reuse:

• National Weather Service, FEMA and USGS: U.S. Government works, in the public domain; quoted.
• Environment Agency, Food Standards Agency, MHRA and OPSS: Open Government Licence v3.0, with its attribution on each page; quoted. The flood notices use the Environment Agency's real-time data API (Beta).
• Environment and Climate Change Canada, Health Canada and Earthquakes Canada: Open Government Licence – Canada, with its attribution; quoted.
• Geoscience Australia: CC BY 4.0; facts shown.
• Bureau of Meteorology: its content is for personal use unless stated otherwise, so AreaZine shows the facts of a warning (type, district, times) and links the Bureau's page, and keeps those pages out of search indexes; the text is not republished.
• British Geological Survey, NSW Rural Fire Service, the ACCC, FSANZ and the vehicle recalls register: facts of each record (time, place, magnitude, type, product), linked to the agency's page; no text is republished. A fire is placed at its locality, never its street.

How AI tools are used

AreaZine is built with AI tools, which write the code, the page designs and the explanatory text of the guides and research pages. They do not decide the numbers: every figure comes from a database query over the agencies' records, and every notice page is assembled from the agency's fields by templates. Guides and research pages are read against the data before they are published.

The limits

• AreaZine is a record, not a warning service. A notice can appear here minutes after the agency issues it, and an agency can extend, cancel or replace it.
• The live NWS feed shows products while they are in force; a product issued and cancelled between two reads can be missing from AreaZine's own record, though the archive counts include it.
• Counts measure what the agencies issued, not what happened: a change in the number of warnings can reflect a change in how an office warns.
• Tornado and severe thunderstorm watches carry a Storm Prediction Center number, and tropical storm, hurricane and storm surge products the National Hurricane Center's storm number, which every office repeats: such an event counts once nationally and once in each state it covers, not once per office.
• The U.S. earthquake record covers the land and offshore waters where the USGS names the nearest place in a U.S. state, plus Puerto Rico; Canada, Australia and the U.K. are counted from their own agencies.
• The U.S. earthquake record is the USGS catalog at magnitude 2.5 and above; smaller events are not counted. The yearly counts for Canada, Australia and the U.K. come from each agency's own catalogue since 2000; denser seismic networks locate more small earthquakes over time, so the count of magnitude 3 or more is the steadier series.
• The NSW fire record has gaps: until 30 September 2026 AreaZine's collector dropped incidents from about the 2nd to the 8th of each month, and none were collected from 7 to 21 May 2026. The fires page lists the days with no record. Planned burns are counted apart from the fires.
• AreaZine does not publish U.S. product, food, drug or vehicle recalls or FDA drug shortages.

Who answers for it

Questions and errors go to hello@areazine.com. We check a reported error against the agency's record, fix it at the source of the error rather than on one page, and list the correction with its date on the corrections page. The about page says who runs the site.