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Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS)

IPAWS Projects

The current IPAWS projects are categorized into the areas of systems engineering, integration, and implementation. The program is defining the standards to which others can build, providing additional transmission paths that will increase reliability through redundancy, integrating with existing public alert and warning systems, incorporating available new technologies, and assessing emerging technology for integration into IPAWS.

EAS Modernization and Expansion Project

From 2009-2011, the IPAWS PMO will expand the number of participating broadcast stations each year for a total of 74 stations. The expansion of participating stations will address known gaps in population coverage. The end goal is to maximize service to the public.

The IPAWS PMO will complete the integration of satellite data transmission paths as a diverse path for EAS message delivery from FEMA to relay stations. Satellite infrastructure can be fully integrated with the legacy EAS and initially provides a reliable, redundant commercial system utilizing multiple uplinks and satellites for national level EAS distribution. An XM Radio transmission path will be complete in the first quarter of 2010, and direct satellite connectivity will be available to the national PEP stations in the third quarter of 2010.

The IPAWS program will continue to develop additional paths such a satellite, digital radio, Internet, and commercial broadcast television for later inclusion into the IPAWS program, to broaden the diversity and increase the types of communications pathways providing public alert and warning messages.

Primary Entry Point (PEP) Expansion

A Primary Entry Point (PEP) Station is a radio broadcast station that provides public information prior to, during, and after a national or local emergency. They are equipped with emergency generators in order to keep broadcasting warning and safety information to the public. IPAWS is expanding the number of PEP stations across the nation from the current number of 37 to 74, with the effect of covering 90 percent of the population. FEMA, through cooperation with station owners and operators of communication facilities, will maintain, and if necessary, restore facilities and capabilities necessary for the public alert and warning system. The PEP Expansion Project and support from FEMA to the broadcasters will help ensure that under all conditions the President of the United States can alert and warn the public.

Standards and Protocols Project

The over-arching goal for the Standards Project is to develop and publish the standards and protocols necessary to establish the interoperable federal infrastructure framework to meet the mission objectives of the IPAWS Program. The alert and warning standards and protocols are essential to defining the architectural interfaces among IPAWS stakeholders to achieve mission-critical functional and operational capabilities. In its end state, the standards and protocols from the standards project will allow non-proprietary, vendor-neutral industry products to interoperate and compete to achieve an effective national interoperable and distributed alert and warning system-of-systems.

The standards project accomplishes this vision through a series of related activities:

Common Alerting Protocol (CAP)

FEMA is working with the public and private sectors to integrate warning systems that allow the President and authorized officials to communicate with the public in times of emergency via television, radio, telephone, email, and other communications pathways. The Common Alerting Protocol Standard or CAP is a format for exchanging emergency alerts allowing a consistent warning message to be disseminated simultaneously over many different warning systems. FEMA is working with the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) to develop a profile to constrain the CAP Standard to meet the needs of the emergency alerting community.

FEMA's partners in developing the IPAWS CAP Profile include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Federal Communications Commission, DHS Science & Technology Directorate, and the Emergency Interoperability Consortium.

The IPAWS CAP Profile’s open standard will facilitate manufacturing by multiple suppliers and will ensure interoperability among alert and warning systems at the federal and state levels as well as across different alert delivery systems. FEMA will establish the IPAWS CAP Profile Conformity Assessment Program to provide an independent, objective analysis of qualified products to ensure they adhere to the IPAWS CAP Profile.

Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS)

The IPAWS vision is to ensure that all Americans are able to receive accurate alerts and warnings, regardless of what communications technologies they use. The inclusion of cellular alerts under the IPAWS system reflects the important role that wireless technologies play in consumers’ lives today. IPAWS will include a wireless mobile alerting capability into the IPAWS network to better warn citizens. Providing critical alert information via wireless devices will help the public avoid danger or respond more quickly during crisis, and thereby save lives and property.

The IPAWS wireless initiative will ensure that:

Geo-Targeted Alerting System (GTAS)

The Geo-Targeted Alerting System (GTAS) Plume Modeling project is a joint development effort between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) Global Systems Division (GSD) and the FEMA IPAWS program to provide Emergency Managers the tools they need to quickly and accurately determine the population impacted by the release of a toxic substance or by severe weather. The application provides Emergency Managers collaboration tools that allow them to leverage and more accurately communicate with their supporting National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Forecast Office (WFO). The application can issue alerts and warnings to the public thorough a variety of alert dissemination systems using the Common Altering Protocol supported by many government organizations and vendors. The GTAS can model over 500 types of hazardous substances and integrates with other Emergency Manager applications, including the Disaster Management Interoperability Service (DMIS) application, which can distribute a targeted alert to one or more of the over 1,000 NWS transmitters across the nation. Local emergency managers can utilize Emergency Telephone Notification (ETN) systems and other local alerting systems where available to notify a specific targeted audience.

Inventory and Evaluation

The Inventory and Evaluation project will catalog and evaluate existing federal, state, territorial, tribal, and local government alert and warning systems. Collected data and reports are intended to describe the inventory of resources (alert and warning systems in use, policies, plans, procedures, staff, facilities) that make up the public alert and warning systems currently used at the federal, state, territorial, tribal, and local levels of government. Additional analysis will provide a view of current capabilities of existing public alert and warning systems resources as compared to planned IPAWS capabilities. This will allow IPAWS to work with these agencies in the planning of additional capabilities, policies, procedures and resources if needed.

Radio Broadcast Data System (RBDS)

Many current FM broadcast stations provide services in addition to their main broadcast channels. These services utilize subsidiary carriers, or frequencies which are combined with and broadcast with their normal audio programming. The most commonly encountered subcarrier is the 57 kHz Radio Broadcast Data System (RBDS) signal which often conveys the station call letter, slogan and/or artist and title information displayed by many automotive FM receivers. The North American Radio Broadcast Data System standard, based in-part upon the pre-existing European Radio Data Standard (RDS) was introduced in 1993.

In 1991, the Federal Communications Commission began an examination of the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) with an eye towards modernizing and improving it with new technologies and procedures. In September 1992, the FCC released a Notice of Proposed Rule making where the RDS (RBDS) Technology was proposed as a possible replacement for the aging EBS. The technology was brought to the United States in the late 1980s as a system for the chemical and nuclear industries and for severe weather and earthquakes. Advances in technology and changes in the threat environment have given rise to several methods of utilizing RBDS to communicate emergency alerts to the public.

Radio Broadcast Data System (RBDS) technologies have been employed to distribute digital alert messages through FM radio stations. FEMA is evaluating innovative methods to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of the national alerts and warnings distribution infrastructure. Congress has directed the IPAWS PMO to validate the usefulness of existing RBDS technologies to deliver notification of individuals during emergencies and the IPAWS PMO has initiated action to evaluate this technology.

Last Modified: Thursday, 10-Dec-2009 13:44:07 EST