Searching by Location

Performing a radial search using our Events API's within parameter is a common way to find events that impact your locations of interest. See our guide on radial searches and the within search parameter.

Which events are returned by a radial search depends on their location and geometry type. The image below shows the result of the example radial search performed in our WebApp: A 4-mile radius around a point in Brooklyn, New York, USA - the search area is the blue circle.

LOCATION AND GEOMETRY TYPE	RADIAL SEARCH MATCHING CRITERION
Point event with Point geometry	Returned if their point falls within the specified radius. In the image below, matching point events are the dots within the blue circle.
Area event with Polygon or MultiPolygon geometry	Returned if any part of the polygons intersect with the specified radius. In the image below, matching events with polygons intersect with the blue circle.
Area event with Point geometry	Returned if the radial search location (the provided lat,lon coordinates regardless of radius) is a child place of the area event's place. In the image below, the dot outside the blue circle is an area event without a polygon. This event covers all of New York City, and since the radial search's location is in Brooklyn, a child place of New York City, this area event was returned also.

When searching for events around a specific business location — a store, hotel, or other fixed site — the recommended approach is to use a Saved Location. When you create a Saved Location from a lat/lon origin, Predicted Impact Area is calculated automatically and stored as the location boundary. You can then reference that location by location_id across the Events API, Features API, and Beam — without managing coordinates or boundaries manually.

If you need a simpler point-and-radius search without a Saved Location, you can use the within parameter directly as described above. In that case, see the Predicted Impact Area API with area_type=radius to get an appropriate radius for your location and industry.

You can also search for events occurring, in particular, Geonames Places using the place.scope parameter with Place ids. In our Severe-Weather Events Data Engineering notebook, we provide code examples to find Place ids for your locations of interest.