NOAA IncidentNews oil spill & marine incident database
NOAA IncidentNews oil spill & marine incident database
NOAA IncidentNews is a public database of oil spills and other marine incidents where NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration provided scientific support, with a searchable web interface, a bulk CSV export and Atom/RSS newsfeeds.
Coverage
4,952 incident rows in the checked CSV (~3.2 MB) with columns including id, open_date, name, location, lat, lon, threat, tags, commodity, measure_* fields, max_ptl_release_gallons, posts and description. Covers incidents where NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration provided scientific support; "some older records between 1957 and 1984 come from third-party databases." An Atom/RSS newsfeed is also offered. Update cadence is Not stated on the checked pages.
Verdict
This is NOAA's public oil-spill and marine-incident database for agents tracking coastal pollution events alongside AIS and sanctions vessel lists, with a bulk CSV (id, dates, location, threat, commodity, release volume and description columns) covering 4,952 incidents where NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration provided scientific support. The raw-data page states: "The contents are in the public domain; there is no copyright restriction," though it notes "some older records between 1957 and 1984 come from third-party databases." Signal Lab links to the official site and its CSV/Atom feeds.
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Use in your agent
Load NOAA IncidentNews incidents into pandas and Parquet. Checked against the provider's documentation on Nov 5, 2026.
Access
- No key for the public IncidentNews site, raw-data page and CSV export.
Request
curl -s 'https://incidentnews.noaa.gov/raw/incidents.csv' -o incidents.csvFormat
CSV (incidents.csv): id, open_date, name, location, lat, lon, threat, tags, commodity, measure_* fields, max_ptl_release_gallons, posts, description.
Load into pandas and Parquet
Needs Python 3 with requests, pandas and pyarrow.
"""NOAA IncidentNews incidents CSV -> pandas -> Parquet."""
import io
import pandas as pd
import requests
UA = {"User-Agent": "SignalLabCheck/1.0"}
URL = "https://incidentnews.noaa.gov/raw/incidents.csv"
r = requests.get(URL, headers=UA, timeout=120)
r.raise_for_status()
df = pd.read_csv(io.BytesIO(r.content), parse_dates=["open_date"])
df.to_parquet("noaa_incidentnews_incidents.parquet", index=False)
print(len(df), df["open_date"].min().date(), df["open_date"].max().date())
print(df[["open_date", "name", "commodity", "max_ptl_release_gallons"]].head())
Run by us on 2026-11-05 (python 3 | pandas | pyarrow | requests). Result: Fetched incidents.csv on 2026-11-05: 4,952 incident rows, open_date 1957-03-29 to 2026-10-31 (CSV about 3.2 MB).
Limits
- Not stated numeric rate limit.
- One CSV of about 3.2 MB; the whole file is fetched in one request.
Quirks
- Covers incidents where NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration provided scientific support, not every spill worldwide.
- Some older records (1957-1984) come from third-party databases.
Terms and attribution
- Public domain per the IncidentNews raw-data page; no copyright restriction.
Sources
- https://incidentnews.noaa.gov/raw/index: “The contents are in the public domain; there is no copyright restriction.”
- https://incidentnews.noaa.gov/raw/index: “Some older records between 1957 and 1984 come from third-party databases.”
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