Emergency Alerts,
Always in Your Pocket

A non-emergency message that provides updated information about an event in progress, an event that has expired or concluded early, pre-event preparation or mitigation activities, post-event recovery operations, or other administrative matters.

Conditions are favorable or expected but not imminent or occurring, warning that Avalanche Warning criteria are likely to be met in 24-48 hours.

Conditions are imminent or occurring.

Issued when there is actionable information related to a law enforcement officer who is missing, seriously injured or killed in the line of duty, or an imminent, credible threat to an officer.

An emergency message about a missing child believed to be abducted, describing the child, suspect, and/or vehicle, asking the public to notify the requesting agency with any information.

A warning of an event presenting danger to a significant civilian population, such as contaminated water supply or an imminent or in-progress attack.

An emergency message regarding an in-progress or imminent significant threat to public safety and/or property.

A demonstration or test message for purposes established in state or local EAS plans.

A warning of current or imminent earthquake activity.

A warning where immediate evacuation is recommended or ordered.

A warning of a spreading wildfire or structural fire threatening a populated area.

A warning of a release of non-radioactive hazardous material that may recommend evacuation or shelter in place.

An emergency message defining an event that alone does not pose a significant threat but could escalate or disrupt critical public safety services.

A warning of a bomb explosion, riot, or other criminal event.

Facilitates alerts for missing and endangered persons not currently covered by AMBER Alerts.

A warning of an event at a nuclear power plant classified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

A warning of the loss, discovery, or release of radiological material.

A pre-scheduled, coordinated test message originated by a designated primary station.

A test message consisting of header and end-of-message tones, scheduled randomly by the station.

A warning where the public is recommended to shelter in place.

An emergency message defining a local or state 911 network outage.

A warning of current or imminent volcanic activity.

The Alert Aggregator, known as the IPAWS Open Platform for Emergency Networks (IPAWS-OPEN), is the part of the IPAWS system that collects emergency alerts, authenticates the sender, and makes the alerts available to alert dissemination services.

An Alerting Authority is a jurisdiction with the designated authority to alert and warn the public through Federal, State, and local laws.

An Alert Originator is an individual person at the keyboard/screen composing and issuing the alert. The Alert Originator utilizes IPAWS in accordance with the Alerting Authority's plans, policies, and procedures to create and send out emergency messages.

Alert origination tools are software products used by emergency managers, public safety officials, and other alerting authorities to create and send critical lifesaving messages to the public or to other emergency management officials for collaboration. An alert origination tool is needed to send messages through IPAWS.

The AMBER Alert Program is a voluntary partnership between law-enforcement agencies, broadcasters, transportation agencies, and the wireless industry, to activate an urgent bulletin in the most serious child abduction cases. AMBER alerts are one of the categories of Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA).

A Collaborative Operating Group or "COG" is a term used by IPAWS to designate an organization that has been granted access to the Alert Aggregator. A COG is established with IPAWS when a Federal, State, territorial, tribal, or local alerting authority executes a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with FEMA in order to access and use IPAWS.

The Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS), also referred to as Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), was established pursuant to the Warning, Alert and Response Network (WARN) Act under Federal Communication Commission (FCC) rules. CMAS enables alerting authorities to broadcast emergency alerts to wireless provider customers with compatible cellular devices who are located in the geographic vicinity of cellular towers serving an affected area.

The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is an XML-based OASIS data format standard adopted by FEMA for exchanging public warnings between alerting technologies. CAP allows a warning message to be sent simultaneously over many warning systems to many different outlets (such as radio, television, mobile devices, Internet).

The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is a national public warning system governed by Federal Communication Commission (FCC) rules that requires broadcasters, cable television systems, wireless cable systems, satellite digital audio radio service (SDARS) providers, and direct broadcast satellite (DBS) providers to supply the communications capability to the President to address the American public during a national emergency. EAS is also used by the National Weather Service to relay weather-related warnings, and may be used by state and local authorities to deliver important emergency information about other types of hazardous situations.

IPAWS implements the Emergency Data Exchange Language Distribution Element (EDXL-DE), an OASIS data specification used for routing emergency information. EDXL-DE may be used to exchange content in a wide variety of commonly used digital formats, including text, images, audio, video, and more.

Federal Information Processing Standards Codes (FIPS Codes) are a standardized set of numeric or alphabetic codes issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to ensure uniform identification of geographic entities. The entities covered include: states, counties, American Indian and Alaska Native areas, etc. FIPS codes are used by IPAWS as one method to specify geographic warning areas.

HazCollect is shorthand for the National Weather Service All-Hazards Emergency Message Collection System that allows authorized public officials to use NOAA communication pathways, such as NOAA weather radio, to send pre- and post-disaster alerts and warnings to the public.

The Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) was established by Presidential Executive Order 13407. In the event of a national emergency, the President will be able to use IPAWS to send a message to the American people quickly and simultaneously through multiple communications pathways. IPAWS is also available to Federal, State, local, territorial and tribal government officials to alert the public via the Emergency Alert System, Wireless Emergency Alerts, NOAA Weather Radio and other National Weather Service dissemination channels, the Internet, existing unique warning systems, and emerging distribution technologies.

Interoperability in the context of IPAWS refers to the use of standard data formats to enable the exchange of information between different platforms or software systems.

IPAWS Open Platform for Emergency Networks (IPAWS-OPEN) is the Alert Aggregator that receives and authenticates messages transmitted by alerting authorities and routes them to alert dissemination services.

The IPAWS Program Management Office (PMO) administers the IPAWS program and is staffed by FEMA employees and other contractor support personnel.

A Memorandum of Agreement is a cooperative document written between parties to work together on an agreed-upon project or meet an agreed objective. FEMA executes MOAs with alerting authorities who wish to use IPAWS to send alerts and warnings, as well as developers who test alerting products in the IPAWS-OPEN test environment.

NOAA Weather Radio (NWR) is a nationwide network of radio stations broadcasting weather information directly from the nearest National Weather Service office. NWR continuously broadcasts warnings, watches, forecasts and other hazard information on frequencies in the 162 MHz band.

NWEM refers to emergency messages for the public about hazardous events that are originated by government organizations other than the National Weather Service, but still utilize NWS alert dissemination services.

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is a not-for-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society. The OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee develops international data standards relating to alerts and warnings as well as other aspects of emergency management.

A Presidential Alert is a category of Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) that is reserved for use of the President of the United States in the event of a national emergency. The equivalent alert in the Emergency Alert System (EAS) is the Emergency Action Notification (EAN).

Primary Entry Point (PEP) stations are radio broadcast stations that cooperatively participate with FEMA to provide emergency alert and warning information to the public prior to, during, and after incidents and disasters.

Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) were established pursuant to the Warning, Alert and Response Network (WARN) Act under Federal Communication Commission (FCC) rules. Alerting authorities can broadcast WEAs to wireless provider customers located in the geographic vicinity of cellular towers serving an affected area.