ATAK Plugin - IPAWS Alerts
Download IPAWS Alerts 0.6 (pick the one matching your ATAK-CIV version, sideload, then load it in ATAK's Plugins manager):
- ATAK-CIV 5.6: https://github.com/takwerx/ipaws-alerts/releases/download/v0.6/ATAK-Plugin-IPAWS-0.6--5.6.0-civ-release.apk
- ATAK-CIV 5.7: https://github.com/takwerx/ipaws-alerts/releases/download/v0.6/ATAK-Plugin-IPAWS-0.6--5.7.0-civ-release.apk
- ATAK-CIV 5.8: https://github.com/takwerx/ipaws-alerts/releases/download/v0.6/ATAK-Plugin-IPAWS-0.6--5.8.0-civ-release.apk
All releases: https://github.com/takwerx/ipaws-alerts/releases
User guide with screenshots: docs/USER_GUIDE.md (https://github.com/takwerx/ipaws-alerts/blob/main/docs/USER_GUIDE.md)
PURPOSE AND CAPABILITIES
Public emergency alerts on the ATAK map, with the filter chosen on the device. An engine, a division or a strike team sets its own states, counties and alert types on the phone, in the field, whether or not there is a server in the path.
- 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.
STATUS
0.6. A fresh install starts with Alerts OFF, and a tap on an alert on the map opens its details straight away, with no radial menu in between. 0.4 was the first public release.
POINT OF CONTACTS
Andreas Johansson, takwerx https://github.com/takwerx/ipaws-alerts/issues
PORTS REQUIRED
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.
EQUIPMENT REQUIRED
An Android device running ATAK-CIV with a network path to api.weather.gov.
EQUIPMENT SUPPORTED
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.
COMPILATION
Standard ATAK plugin build. Set sdk.path in local.properties to an unpacked ATAK SDK matching ext.ATAK_VERSION in app/build.gradle, then:
./gradlew assembleCivDebug
./gradlew assembleCivRelease
DEVELOPER NOTES
Alert areas are ATAK features in a store this plugin owns, registered with addOverlay so they appear in the Overlay Manager under "IPAWS Alerts" with one entry per severity. Every feature is ClampToGround, or polygons carrying any altitude sink under terrain on zoom, and every area is flattened to a single level of geometry collection before it is stored: FeatureSetDatabase2 writes a collection nested inside another as a point at 0,0, which lost 15% of areas.
The colors are data/EventColors.java, generated from weather.gov/help-map by the verifier, which also fails the release gate when a live event type has no color or a color has drifted from what NWS publishes.
The zoom gate is applied by the plugin on settled map moves, not as the feature sets' resolution range: ATAK's renderer tests that range against its own draw resolution, rounded to a tile level, and hid alerts at zooms the status line called close enough. The ON / OFF switch and the gate share one visibility path.
Most alerts carry no geometry of their own - measured at 312 of 337 - and name the forecast zones they cover instead. Those zones are fetched one at a time (the bulk zone endpoint answers 200 with null geometry, silently) using the URL the alert supplied verbatim, so the zone type is never guessed, and they are cached on the device, each zone's extent also kept in memory so a distance- scoped rebuild rejects far alerts without opening their files. An alert none of whose zones will resolve is drawn at its state's center, from the same table the infra-TAK Node-RED flow uses. A poll that fails never blanks the overlay; the last good set stays and the status line gives its age.
Counties are filtered on the device rather than asked of the server. Alerts are issued against forecast zones, not counties, but every alert carries the counties it covers in geocode.SAME, so a county toggle re-filters the set already in hand instead of costing a request. Where SAME cannot settle it, the alert's assembled area is intersected with the county polygon.
The poll lives in a component that lasts the plugin's life, never in a Tool: ATAK ends the active tool whenever another starts or a dropdown opens.
LICENSE
Copyright (C) 2026 Andreas Johansson (TAKWERX).
IPAWS is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later), with an additional permission for the TAK Software so that this plugin may be built against the TAK SDK, loaded into ATAK and distributed without the AGPL reaching into ATAK itself.
You may run it, study it, modify it, and share it -- for any purpose, commercial or not, with no fee and no per-seat license. What the AGPL adds over a permissive license is a guarantee that it stays free: modify IPAWS and pass it on, and the people you pass it to are owed the complete corresponding source of your version under the same license. Nobody can take this, close it, and sell it back to the emergency-services community.
If you only install and use IPAWS, this obligation never touches you. Running it, in any agency, on any number of devices, triggers nothing.
Scope. The AGPL covers IPAWS's own code. It does not change the license of the TAK Software, which stays under the TAK Software License Agreement, and it does not cover the parts of this repository scaffolded from the TAK-SDK plugin template -- those are listed under Provenance in LICENSE-EXCEPTION.md. No SDK binary is distributed here.
Contributions are welcome -- see CONTRIBUTING.md for the contribution terms and the Contributor License Agreement.