IPAWS Ingest

IPAWS is FEMA's Integrated Public Alert and Warning System.  It combines the Emergency Alert System (EAS), Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), and National Weather Service Dissemination Systems.  The data stream uses the CAP 1.2 protocol.

If you want to know more about IPAWS, see http://www.fema.gov/alerting-authorities.  Users of this data stream are required to sign an agreement with FEMA.

The IPAWS data stream is based on pull technology.  That means that we have to poll the IPAWS server to receive new products.  Our default setting is to poll once per minute.  This is in contrast to the EMWIN, NWWS, and NoaaPort data streams, which are push streams.

We have been testing our new ingest engine for a couple of weeks.  This has allowed us to see the different products that appear on the stream.

Since this data stream is based on CAP 1.2, we needed a new decoder for Weather Message.  We have spent some time redesigning our decoder so that it will work with NWS and CAP products.  This was major work, but the results have been excellent.  We are now testing the new decoder to insure that there are no issues with decoding received products.

We are working on changes for our alarm setup.  There will be a new option to select different filtering criteria for CAP messages.  Weather products that appear on the IPAWS data stream will continue to be filtered by our existing alarm criteria.  Other messages, however will require some additional criteria.

Here is an example product that was received by our new ingest engine and processed by the new decoder.  This is not a weather product.  Weather products look similar to those received over our standard weather data streams.  Non-weather products however look different.  This format may change as we get more experience with the CAP products.

Id     : NC.000_1034_2015-12-02T14:59:44-05:00
Event  : Required Weekly Test
Sender : EMnet-NC.000,Melbourne,FL
Issued : 12/2/2015 1:59:44 PM
Expires: 12/2/2015 3:59:44 PM

Category  : Geo
Scope     : Public
Type      : Alert
Status    : Actual
Urgency   : Unknown
Severity  : Unknown
Certantity: Unknown
Response  :

Headline
EAS Required Weekly Test

Description
"THIS IS A REQUIRED WEEKLY TEST FROM THE NORTH CAROLINA STATE EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER "


Area: All North Carolina
Resource link: http://publicwarning.us/capresources/NC_000_ID1034_TM565F4D39_en-US.mp3
 

We will be posting more information as we get closer to a beta release.