IPAWS Alerts v0.6

Features in full

• States, territories and offshore waters, any number of them, picked one by one or a region at a time.
• Counties inside a state, where a county is a TOUCH and not a filing: an alert shows if its area reaches the county, whether or not the National Weather Service filed it under that county. A marine zone names no county at all, and a forecast zone that laps a county line is filed however NWS chose.
• Alert types by category - Fire, Civil and Emergency, Marine, Winter and Cold, and nine more - all on to begin with, so an operator who does not want marine switches off one control rather than untick twenty type names. Each category can then be narrowed to particular types.
• CAP severity as a filter, all of them on a fresh install.
• Each alert type drawn in the National Weather Service's own color for it, the table every public weather map uses, with a map key listing only the types on the map.
• Map controls: an Alerts ON / OFF switch that shows its state (OFF on a fresh install), a zoom gate ("draw when the scale bar reads 5 mi or closer"), and a distance limit - within N miles of My Location or of the map center, or what is in view.
• A list grouped by alert type, worst first, with how long each alert has left, and tap-to-details carrying the issuing office's headline, what is happening and what to do. Tapping an area on the map opens the same page.
• Notifications, off by default: at chosen severities, in the operator's states or within N miles of the device, new alerts only or updates too, on their own high-importance Android channel. Tapping one opens that alert.

Everything it draws is local to the device. Nothing is published, and there is no path by which this plugin puts an alert on another phone.

The alerts come from the National Weather Service: NWS's own products plus the non-weather messages NWS relays, which is where Evacuation Immediate, Civil Emergency Message, Local Area Emergency and Child Abduction Emergency come from. It is not the FEMA IPAWS-OPEN aggregator, which carries state and local originators and requires a signed agreement with FEMA.

Equipment required

An Android device running ATAK-CIV with a network path to api.weather.gov.

Works with

Any ATAK-CIV device. No external hardware, no radios, no sensors.

A position fix is used on a fresh install to preselect the state the device is in, and, only when the operator chooses it, to measure "within N miles of My Location" for the map or for notifications. It never leaves the device. Without a fix the plugin says so: it selects nothing on a fresh install, and measures from the map center instead of My Location.

Network and security

Outbound HTTPS (TCP 443) to api.weather.gov only.

The plugin refuses any request that is not HTTPS, does not follow redirects, and will not fetch a URL from any other host - including URLs that arrive inside a response body, which is how zone geometry is referenced. No inbound ports, no listeners, and no traffic to a TAK server.

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