This page provides a complete sample response for a high surf hazard from the Active Hazards API endpoint. High surf hazards cover dangerous coastal wave and surf conditions and are sourced from agencies such as the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) and the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS). This sample uses the BoM alert format, which follows the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard for coastal hazard warnings.
High Surf-Specific Properties
Incident Data
The incident.properties object for a BoM high surf hazard contains CAP-based alert metadata. Key incident properties include:
senderName - Issuing agency (e.g., "Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology")
headline - Alert headline text describing the hazardous surf warning and affected coastal areas
description - Detailed alert description (may be empty for some BoM alerts where the headline contains the primary information)
severity - CAP severity level (e.g., "Moderate")
urgency - CAP urgency level (e.g., "Unknown")
certainty - CAP certainty level (e.g., "Unknown")
event - Event type name (e.g., "Large Coastal Surf")
effective / expires - ISO 8601 timing fields for the alert window
onset - May be null for some BoM-sourced alerts
msgType - CAP message type (e.g., "Update")
instruction - Recommended actions (may be empty)
category - CAP category (e.g., "Met" for meteorological)
incidentLocationName - Human-readable location (e.g., "NE of Ulladulla, New South Wales, Australia")
headlineDescription - Full descriptive headline with coastal zone details
Features
The features property contains a GeoJSON FeatureCollection with EXPOSURE_AREA and SMART_ALERT features. Each EXPOSURE_AREA feature represents a zone with a specific severity level. BoM-sourced alerts use MultiPolygon geometry covering coastal zones.
Exposure Areas
High surf hazards use a single exposure level representing the source-provided alert area:
Level 1: Source-provided alert area - the coastal zones covered by the hazardous surf warning
Sample Response
Note: Coordinate arrays have been replaced with [...] for brevity. In actual API responses, these contain complete GeoJSON coordinate arrays. The incident.properties object has been truncated with "..." to show only key fields. The full response includes additional CAP metadata fields. This sample shows a BoM-sourced hazardous surf warning covering the New South Wales coast of Australia. Note that exposureAssessment shows minimal population because this alert covers primarily offshore and coastal waters. The features collection includes EXPOSURE_AREA and SMART_ALERT features; BoM alerts use AMOC-AreaCode geocode values in the full CAP_INFO features rather than the profile:CAP-CP:Location codes used by Environment Canada.
