IPAWS Domain

Overview#

A PSAP dispatcher is monitoring conditions during a severe weather event in the Gulf Coast. A tornado warning is issued for two counties in her jurisdiction. Rather than switching to a separate FEMA portal to check the alert details, the warning appears directly in her operational picture with full CAP metadata: the affected area, the urgency level, the expected duration, and the issuing authority. Moments later, a flash flood watch for an adjacent county appears alongside it. The IPAWS domain brings FEMA's national emergency alert system directly into platform workflows so dispatchers work from a single, integrated picture.

IPAWS alerts are authoritative federal notifications. Integrating them removes the need for dispatchers to monitor external channels during high-pressure situations and ensures that national alerts are automatically visible in the context of the incidents they are managing locally.

Key Features#

Active emergency alert retrieval from FEMA IPAWS
Area code filtering for location-specific alert queries
Full CAP v1.2 standard support with structured alert data
Alert classification by category: geo, met, safety, security, rescue, fire, health, env, transport, and CBRNE
Urgency levels: immediate, expected, future, past, and unknown
Severity levels: extreme, severe, moderate, minor, and unknown
Alert status tracking: actual, exercise, system, and test
Message type support: alert, update, cancel, acknowledge, and error

Use Cases#

Displaying active emergency alerts to PSAP operators for situational awareness during ongoing incidents
Filtering alerts by geographic area to focus attention on location-specific warnings relevant to active operations
Integrating federal emergency alerts into platform notification workflows so alerts inform dispatch decisions automatically
Providing real-time severe weather and public safety alert information to operators without requiring them to monitor external channels

Industry Context#

County emergency management offices use IPAWS integration to ensure that national-level severe weather warnings, AMBER alerts, and civil emergency messages appear immediately in their operational systems. State emergency operations centres correlate federal alerts with their own incident records. PSAP operators at 911 dispatch centres benefit from CBRNE alert visibility when responding to calls near chemical facilities or transportation corridors. Island and coastal jurisdictions use the geographically filtered alert capability to focus on relevant tsunami and maritime weather alerts. Military bases in CONUS monitor IPAWS for alerts affecting surrounding communities that may require on-base emergency procedures.

Integration#

The IPAWS domain integrates with Alert for platform alerting, Notification for user notifications, Geo for geographic context, Emergency for response coordination, and PSAP for 911 services. Alert data is retrieved from FEMA IPAWS using the CAP v1.2 standard and stored transiently per organisation for operational display.

Open Standards#

OASIS Common Alerting Protocol v1.2 (CAP 1.2): The canonical message format for all IPAWS alert exchange; the domain parses inbound CAP feeds from FEMA and constructs outbound CAP XML conforming to the urn:oasis:names:tc:emergency:cap:1.2 schema, enforcing the business rules from § 3.2 of the specification at construction time.
W3C XML Digital Signatures (XMLDSig): Outbound CAP messages are signed using an enveloped XMLDSig signature (namespace http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#) with RSA-SHA256 and Exclusive C14N, matching the specific profile required by the FEMA IPAWS OPEN submission endpoint.
W3C Exclusive XML Canonicalisation 1.0 (Exc-C14N): Used as both the canonicalisation transform in XMLDSig signing and the reference transform for digest computation, ensuring the signed byte stream is well-defined regardless of namespace prefix variation.
47 CFR § 11.31 Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME): The EAS feed produces SAME header strings conforming to the FCC regulatory format, including the six-digit location codes, quantised duration fields, originator codes (EAS, CIV, WXR, PEP, EAN), and three-letter event codes required for Emergency Alert System broadcast via IPAWS OPEN.
CTIA Wireless Emergency Alerts 3.0 (WEA 3.0): The WEA feed enforces the WEA 3.0 message profile, including the 360-character UTF-8 body limit, the WEAHandling event code vocabulary, and geocode requirements before submitting to the IPAWS OPEN WEA channel.
NWS HazCollect CAP feed: The domain ingests and emits to the National Weather Service HazCollect channel, recognising NWS-specific event code vocabularies (SAME and NWS valueName pairs) to route meteorological alerts such as tornado warnings and flash flood watches to the correct downstream consumers.
GraphQL: All IPAWS query operations (retrieve active alerts, filter by area code) are exposed through a Strawberry GraphQL schema, allowing platform clients to request structured alert data over the standard platform API surface.

Last Reviewed: 2026-02-05 Last Updated: 2026-04-14