Get alerts

Use this action to retrieve the active weather alerts for one of your Environment Canada locations, such as warnings, watches, advisories, statements, and endings.

This action returns its result in a response variable, which you can use in later steps of the same automation or script, for example to send a notification with the details of a current warning.

Using this action from the user interface

If you prefer building automations and scripts visually, Home Assistant walks you through this action step by step. You pick what to target, tweak a few options, and save. No YAML knowledge required.

To get alerts from an automation or a script:

1. Go to Settings > Automations & scenes.
2. Open an existing automation or script, or select Create automation > Create new automation.
3. If you’re setting up a new automation, add a trigger in the When section. Scripts don’t need a trigger. They run when something else calls them.
4. In the Then do section, select Add action.
5. From the search box, search for and select Environment Canada: Get alerts.
6. Select the Environment Canada service to get the alerts for.
7. In the Response variable field, enter a name to store the data in, such as alerts.
8. Select Save.

This action does not support targets. In the UI, you are not prompted to choose an area, device, entity, or label.

Options in the UI

Using this action in YAML

If you work directly in YAML, or you want to know exactly what Home Assistant does under the hood, this section has the technical reference. It lists the field names you use in YAML, their types, and which ones are required.

In YAML, refer to this action as environment_canada.get_alerts. Store the result in a response variable so you can use it in later steps:

action: environment_canada.get_alerts
data:
  config_entry_id: 1b4ba1c4d8f5e3a29c6e7d2f0a3b8c91
response_variable: alerts

This stores the active alerts for the selected location in alerts.

Options in YAML

Response data

The response is a mapping keyed by alert category. Each category holds a list of the alerts that are currently active for that category:

• warnings: Active warnings.
• watches: Active watches.
• advisories: Active advisories.
• statements: Active statements.
• endings: Alerts that have recently ended.

A category with no active alerts contains an empty list. Each alert item describes the alert with fields such as title, date, alert_colour_level, and expiry_time.

warnings:
  - title: Snowfall warning in effect
    date: "2024-01-01T12:00:00+00:00"
    alert_colour_level: red
    expiry_time: "2024-01-02T00:00:00+00:00"
watches: []
advisories: []
statements: []
endings: []

Try it yourself

Ready to test this? Open Developer tools > Actions, search for this action, fill in the fields, and select Perform action. You see what happens on your actual entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service. [Learn more] without writing a line of YAML.

Still stuck?

The Home Assistant community is quick to help: join Discord for real-time chat, post on the community forum with the action you’re calling and what you expected to happen, or share on our subreddit /r/homeassistant.

Related actions

These actions work well alongside this one:

• Get forecasts: Retrieves the raw daily and hourly forecast data from Environment Canada.

• Set radar type: Sets the type of radar imagery shown by an Environment Canada radar camera.