From acb at incident.com  Wed Jul  7 22:54:44 2010
From: acb at incident.com (Art Botterell)
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2010 22:54:44 -0700
Subject: [CAP] Free Polygons!
Message-ID: <04604564-55B7-4F2F-85F4-6B90AED23093@incident.com>

Friends -

Hazards don't respect political boundaries.  Nonetheless, we in the U.S. have grown accustomed to using county-level FIPS codes for the Emergency Alert System and Weather Radio.  

So to help ease the CAP-driven transition from predefined codes to event-specific GIS geometries, I've taken the liberty of producing a set of simple CAP-ready polygon strings for all 3,235 county-level jurisdictions in the USA.  They're available for any use you can think of, as a text file at <http://www.incident.com/cap/fips_polys.txt> and an Excel file at <http://www.incident.com/cap/fips_polys.xls>.  There are links on the CAP Cookbook, too.

These polygons are based on federal GIS data as published by the National Weather Service and converted to what are called "convex hulls" using some open-source software called PostGIS.  The conversion massively reduces the number of points it takes to describe a line around each county.  It also puts them in the right format for use in CAP alerts.

One application might be to provide an automatic look-up in CAP origination software so alerts based on FIPS codes alone could include corresponding geometries.  At the other end, alerts that arrive with nothing but a FIPS code could be plotted on a map or fed into a telephone database using these polygons.

Ultimately, of course, I hope we'll strive to increase the production of hazard-specific polygons and shed our reliance on these relatively low-resolution administrative zones.  But we can do it step by step.

So I hope they help.

- Art

PS - I'll be happy to brief anyone who cares on the technical GIS details of this conversion... it's not complicated once you get the free open source software installed.  So the same technique could be used to generate "standard" polygons for other known boundaries (cities, fire weather zones, etc.) anywhere in the world.  Just as long as there are shapefiles available, it's actually only a few minutes work.

From acb at incident.com  Thu Jul  8 10:00:14 2010
From: acb at incident.com (Art Botterell)
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2010 10:00:14 -0700
Subject: [CAP] Publicly visible CAP alerts?
Message-ID: <35F281A1-D34A-41F9-9534-A049970BD3DD@incident.com>

Friends -

Working on an update and expansion of my list of public CAP sources, and I'd appreciate your help.

I'm looking for pointers to visible (generally speaking, Internet) "feeds" of current CAP alerts around the world.  So far, my working list includes the following:

Anguilla
California EDIS
Contra Costa County (CA) CWS
National Weather Service
NWS Alaska Tsunami Center
nyAlerts.gov
Sarnia-Lambton, Ontario
U.S. EPA
U.S.G.S. Earthquakes

What other sources are out there?

I'd be particularly interested in public access to alerts generated using the EMNet and MyStateUSA systems.  Can anyone from states using those systems advise on whether and how their alerts are made available to the public?

I'd also appreciate updates on any public visibility into the work in Sri Lanca

Thanks!

- Art