IPAWS Archived Alerts

What you can build

• Reconstruct which alerts covered a site during an incident

  When a site reports damage or a closure, the operator pulls every alert whose searchGeometry intersected the site over the window and drafts the incident record with sender, event, severity, and instruction lines.

  With Incident Draft

• Explain a dip with the warnings that hit the area

  When orders, calls, or attendance fall in one region, the operator lists the Wireless Emergency Alerts and EAS messages that covered it that day and proposes an annotation on the metric.

  With Change Annotation, Root Cause

• Keep an evidence file of public warnings

  For claims and audits, the operator files the original CAP XML and the parsed sent, expires, and area fields for each alert that touched a site, with the OpenFEMA citation.

  With Compliance Evidence

• Rank sites by warning frequency

  Across a portfolio, the operator counts alerts by event and severity per site over a year and proposes a table for the site review.

  With Site Benchmark

Requirements

• A polygon or point for each site, to match against searchGeometry with geo.intersects() in a $filter
• Paging with $skip and $top; a call returns 1,000 records by default and at most 10,000
• A refresh interval no more frequent than the dataset's own, which OpenFEMA lists as R/PT2M
• The OpenFEMA citation in anything you publish: the endpoint with its version, the access date and time, and FEMA's non-endorsement statement

Authentication

No key or account. OpenFEMA states that use of the service is free and does not require a subscription or API key.

Limits

• Alerts appear after a twenty-four hour delay by design; this archive is not a live alerting feed
• FEMA does not validate the content of each message; the data are raw and unedited and not intended as a federal report
• The archive is large: OpenFEMA lists 4,885,168 records and a file size class of 500MB to 10GB, so history loads are paced
• OpenFEMA's terms restrict use to statistical research or a reporting record and forbid determinations affecting an individual's rights or eligibility

Questions and answers

How current is the IPAWS archive?

Records are published with a twenty-four hour delay to reduce the risk of confusion with an active alert from the live IPAWS feed. OpenFEMA lists the dataset's update frequency as R/PT2M, every two minutes, and asks that your refresh interval be no more frequent than the dataset's own.

What does each record contain?

The originalMessage XML and parsed CAP v1.2 fields: identifier, sender, sent, status (Actual, Exercise, System), msgType (Alert, Update, Cancel, Ack), scope, and an info array with event, urgency, severity, certainty, headline, description, instruction, eventCode, and area entries. searchGeometry holds GeoJSON of the well-formed geometries.

How do I cite OpenFEMA data?

Cite the endpoint including its version, by name or URL, and the date and time you accessed it. Include FEMA's statement that the product uses the OpenFEMA API but is not endorsed by FEMA, and that FEMA cannot vouch for data or analyses derived after retrieval.