GDACS

What you can build

• Hold inbound orders behind a Red cyclone

  When a TC or FL event at Orange or Red covers a supplier's location, the operator lists the open purchase orders from that supplier and proposes a delay expectation and a chase.

  With Inbound Delay, Supplier Fill Rate

• Reroute shipments crossing an alert box

  The operator matches in-transit shipment lanes to the bounding box of new Orange or Red events and proposes an exception note per shipment with the GDACS report link.

  With Carrier Exception

• Warn staff at sites inside an alert

  For an EQ, TC, or WF event whose polygon covers a site, the operator drafts a notice with alert level, dates, and the CAP instruction, for a person to send.

  With Severe Weather Notice, Evacuation Roster

• Watch vendor sites for disruption

  The operator keeps a list of vendor locations, flags any inside a current event, and proposes an outage watch with the episode id and alert score.

  With Vendor Outage

Requirements

• A point or polygon per site, supplier, or lane to test against gdacs:bbox and, where needed, the event polygon from /api/Polygons/getgeometry
• A rule for which alert levels act: Green for awareness, Orange and Red for a proposal
• Polling of rss.xml on an interval, with gdacs:datemodified and gdacs:episodeid used to tell a new episode from a repeat
• Credit to GDACS on reuse: per-event resources carry the notice European Union, CC BY 4.0, reuse allowed with appropriate credit

Authentication

No key or account. The RSS, CAP, and KML feeds and the JSON API answer plain GET requests; the Swagger document declares no security scheme.

Limits

• GDACS states its information is purely indicative and should not be used for decision making without other sources
• Notifications are near real time, but no guarantee is given of completeness or timeliness, and they do not replace national alerts
• Floods and volcanic eruptions are entered manually; only earthquakes, tsunamis, and tropical cyclones are fully automatic
• Search endpoints return the first 100 elements and need pageSize and pageNumber to page further

Questions and answers

What do the Green, Orange, and Red levels mean?

They come from the GDACS alert score. For earthquakes, Green is a score below 1, Orange from 1 to below 2, Red 2 and above; the score weighs intensity, exposed population by Modified Mercalli zone, and country vulnerability from the INFORM index. Tsunami scores are calculated separately.

How fast are alerts issued?

Earthquake, tsunami, and tropical cyclone assessments are automatic. The earthquake model uses USGS shakemaps made available a few minutes after the event. Floods and volcanic eruptions are entered manually. GDACS gives no guarantee of completeness or timeliness.

Can I reuse GDACS data?

The RSS channel is marked public domain, and per-event resources carry a European Union CC BY 4.0 notice requiring credit to GDACS. The terms of use provide the data as is, without warranty, and state that GDACS services do not override alerts from national disaster management authorities.