1. Implementation of CAP by U.S. National Weather Service
NOAA’s National Weather Service
Implementation of CAP by U.S. National Weather Service
Ron Jones
Office of the Chief Information Officer
Internet Services Branch
NOAA’s National Weather Service

2. Early efforts for XML format
Severe weather watches/warnings/advisories made available via Internet in RSS – 2003/2004
Very popular with users
RSS feeds by state, county, and aggregated national feeds
Updated every 2 to 3 minutes

3. CAP 1.0
Common Alerting Protocol 1.0 offered significant improvements over RSS
CAP format begun as experimental format 2004/2005
Public coments accepted on format through 2007
CAP 1.0 continues as experimental service

4. HazCollect
HazCollect Project utilizes NOAA/NWS infrastrcuture to disseminate hazardous situation messages from local emergency management offcials
NWS continues to work with HazCollect project to aggregate CAP messages into NWS datastream
Internet page display of warnings as well as transmission over local NOAA Weather Radio transmitters

5. Migration to CAP 1.1
CAP 1.1 features more detailed pre-parsing of NWS products than previously available and also feature ATOM based index feeds.
Posted as experimental service mid-2008
Public comments accepted through Decembr 1, 2008
Messages offered in CAP, Atom, and RSS formats
Feeds make use of the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) to describe how files encoded in the XML standard are to be formatted or transformed for display by your web browser.
It is expected these CAP 1.1 feeds will replace the current CAP 1.0 feeds by December 2009.

6. Medium and long range goals
Much progress has been made in offering severe weather watches, warnings, and advisiories in CAP format; however, there is still much work to be accomplished
Creation of bulletins in CAP, not parsed from text bulletin
“Push” of CAP feeds vs “Pull”
Improved use of CAP by local authorities

7. CAP feeds available CAP 1.0 feeds http://www.weather.gov/alerts/
Information on Atom format
Atom Syndication Format