Get current disastersGet every disaster GDACS has an open alert for right now - earthquakes, tropical cyclones, floods, volcanoes, wildfires and droughts together, most severe first. This is the action for anything on a schedule: it needs nothing filled in, and it reads the same live list GDACS's own app shows, so one request answers 'is anything happening?' for the whole world. Narrow it to the hazards you care about, or to orange and red only, if a green alert is not worth a message.
Search disastersSearch the GDACS archive by hazard, alert level, dates and country. This is the action for a specific question about a window or a place - 'the orange and red floods in Pakistan this year' - while Get current disasters is the one for watching on a schedule. Countries are matched exactly, which takes some doing on GDACS's side: its own filter matches names as text, so Niger would otherwise return Nigeria.
Find disasters affecting a placeFind the disasters whose affected area covers a place - an office, a warehouse, a supplier, a customer's address - nearest first, each with how far away its centre is and in which direction. GDACS does the covering test itself against the real mapped shapes: a flood's inundated area, an earthquake's shaking contours, a cyclone's wind swath. That is the difference between 'an earthquake happened 200 km away' and 'this site is inside the strong-shaking zone'. 'is_affected' is the single true or false to branch on. Testing a place against every mapped shape is real work, so this one takes a few seconds where the others take under one.
Get disaster detailsGet everything GDACS holds on one disaster: where and when, how big, how many people it exposed, what has actually been reported on the ground - deaths, displacement, evacuations - and a map image to put in a message. Use it to fill out an alert an earlier step found, or to re-read an event someone linked to; a GDACS report link can be pasted straight into the ID.
Get the affected areaGet how far a disaster reaches, zone by zone: an earthquake's shaking-intensity bands, a flood's inundated area, a cyclone's wind swath. Each zone comes back with its edges, its centre and how many kilometres it spans - the numbers for a briefing or a map, rather than the outline itself, which for a flood runs to megabytes of coordinates. The link to those shapes is included for anything that does want them.
Count disastersCount the disasters in a window, split by hazard and by alert level, without fetching any of them. One small answer however big the number, which makes it the cheap way for a schedule to ask 'was there anything serious?' before doing the expensive part - and the way to size a search before running it. There is deliberately no country here: GDACS can only narrow a count by matching a country's name as text, which would count Nigeria's floods as Niger's, and a wrong total is worse than none. Search disasters filters countries exactly and reports how many it found.
Get disaster newsGet the news coverage GDACS has gathered about one disaster, newest first - the European Commission's media monitor watching thousands of outlets worldwide. Use it to put context under an alert, or to see whether a disaster is being reported at all. A new event has no coverage for the first hours, which comes back as an empty list rather than an error.
Get a country's disaster historyGet a country's recorded natural disasters going back to 1900, with the deaths, the people affected and the damage in US dollars - and the totals across everything that matched. This is the counted record, from EM-DAT, rather than the live alerts: what a flood in this country has historically cost, which is the question behind siting a warehouse, pricing a risk or writing a country brief.
Get active volcanoesGet the volcanoes that have reported activity recently - ash plumes, sulphur dioxide, aviation advisories - most recently reported first. A volcano only becomes a GDACS alert once there is an eruption to alert on; this is the watch list underneath that, which is what aviation, shipping and travel workflows need before it gets that far.
Check service statusCheck whether GDACS is answering, and how quickly. This is the one action that reports a problem as a value instead of failing the step, so a scheduled workflow can decide what to do about it - skip today's digest, wait, or say the data is stale rather than dying halfway through. Being rate limited is reported separately from being down.
