Home / Topics / Natural disasters
Topic filterNatural disasters news API
Earthquakes, floods, storms, wildfires and their aftermath. Pass topic=NATURAL_DISASTER to filter.
What does the natural disasters topic actually cover?
Event reporting, damage assessment, response and recovery. Coverage is intensely concentrated in the first seventy-two hours and then falls away sharply, often well before the situation resolves.
How do I filter news to natural disasters?
Pass topic=NATURAL_DISASTER on /search or /stories. Query with a tight time bound and poll frequently during an event; a daily window is too coarse for the first day. Local-language coverage carries operational detail — road closures, shelter locations, specific damage — that international reporting omits entirely.
GET /stories?topic=NATURAL_DISASTER&mode=hybrid&from=2026-07-24&limit=20 What catches people out with natural disasters coverage?
The volume curve does not track the severity curve. Coverage peaks early and decays fast regardless of how long recovery takes, so a drop in volume says nothing about whether conditions improved. For recovery monitoring, query the affected country directly rather than the topic.
Who publishes on it
Local and national outlets in the affected country first, then wires, then international coverage. The local reporting carries operational specifics — closures, shelters, named locations — and disappears from international coverage entirely within days.
In the sample, 1537 outlets carry natural disasters coverage at about 2
articles each. The busiest is tribunnews.com at roughly 2%,
and tribunnews.com, inewsgr.com, naslovi.net account for about 4% between them.
Flat enough that volume here translates fairly directly into independent reporting rather than one newsroom publishing repeatedly.
What it is best for
Best for the first seventy-two hours of an event and for recovery monitoring via the affected country's own press. Weakest for anything beyond the initial peak, because coverage decays on a schedule unrelated to how long conditions persist.
Monitoring it over time
Poll on a much tighter cadence than any other topic during the first day, then step down. The operational detail that matters, such as closures, access and specific damage, exists almost entirely in local-language coverage and vanishes from the international stream within seventy-two hours, so anything needed for recovery monitoring has to be captured while it is still being published. Recovery and reconstruction coverage is the half that is almost never monitored. Attention collapses within days of an event while the consequential decisions — funding, rebuilding standards, relocation — are taken over the following months and reported locally at a fraction of the volume. A window sized to the disaster captures the damage and none of the response.
Which signals pair with natural disasters?
Topic filtering answers what an article is about. Signals answer how strongly it reads that way and in what register, so combining them is usually sharper than either alone.
climate— Climate and extreme weatheranxiety— Public alarm and apprehensionsupply_disruption— Interrupted production, logistics, shortage
GET /search?topic=NATURAL_DISASTER&signal=climate&signal_min=0.25 Recent coverage
From the index on 2026-07-31, in the language each was published in.
- Firefighters contain 5-acre brush fire in St. Johns County off County Road 13
- Retail News: New Bikini Barista Coffee Stand Opens in Yakima
- First Alert: Scattered rain and cooler temperatures are on the way this weekend
- Retail News: New Bikini Barista Coffee Stand Opens in Yakima
- Firefighters battle the last hot spots of a monster wildfire...
- Monsoon becomes active again incity, receives continuous showers
- Cyclone leaves Gladiators ahead of new series being filmed
- 4 bodies recovered after avalanche on Pakistan mountain; Nepal's Nirmal Purja, who led 10-member climbing team among missing
Who covers it
tribunnews.com · inewsgr.com · naslovi.net · zazoom.it · merkur.de · haberler.com · indiatimes.com · hna.de · china.com · kreiszeitung.de · az-online.de · baidu.com
Counts are provisional pending a snapshot against the API.