Weather data is of interest to many R users. Existing R packages, including weatherData, provide access to sources of current and historical weather conditions data. But there has been no R package to retrieve current weather alerts data, such as the advisories, watches, and warnings issued by government weather agencies. This talk introduces the new R package weatherAlerts, which retrieves active weather alerts from the United States National Weather Service (NWS). I will discuss potential applications for visualization and analysis, demonstrate uses in the Internet of Things, and seek international collaborators to expand the geographical scope of the package.nnFurthermore, weather alerts are associated with affected geographical areas, which are often specified as references to predefined polygons in external sources of spatial data. Common applications of weather alerts data require merging the data with this spatial data, so that each weather alert includes a polygon or polygons specifying its affected geographical area. This talk introduces the companion package weatherAlertAreas, which compactly represents all predefined polygon areas used in NWS alerts, and eliminates the substantial effort that was previously required to merge NWS alerts data with corresponding spatial data.
