Federal Information Processing Standard

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[edit] FIPS Creation

In 1994, NOAA began broadcastingcoded signals called FIPS (Federal Information Processing System) codes along with their standard weather broadcasts from stations in your area. These codes identify the type of emergency and the specific geographic area (such as a county) affected by the emergency.

Federal information processing standards codes (FIPS codes) are a standardized set of numeric or alphabetic codes issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology ([1]) to ensure uniform identification of geographic entities through all federal government agencies. The entities covered include: states and statistically equivalent entities, counties and statistically equivalent entities, named populated and related location entities (such as, places and county subdivisions), and American Indian and Alaska Native areas.

[edit] FIPS Codes Information

For the purpose of broadcasting weather information, the National Weather Service ([2]) has divided the United States into regions by state and county (or parish, where applicable) then assigned a 6-digit FIPS code to identify each county or parish. For example, the code for Tarrant County, Texas, is 048439.

The first digit in a FIPS code identifies the county subdivision, the next two digits identify the state, and the last three digits identify the county or parish.

Examples of FIPS Codes:

• FIPS country codes and region codes (10-4)
• FIPS place codes (55-3)
• FIPS county codes (6-4)
• FIPS state codes (5-2)

All similar to or comparable with (but not the same as) ISO 3166, or the NUTS standard of the European Union.

Important Notice: The GNIS Feature ID superseded the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 55-3 database Place Code, now referred to as the Census Code as the Federal standard geographic feature record identifier. The FIPS 55-3 standard has been withdrawn and the FIPS55 data have been incorporated into the GNIS. The Census Bureau will continue to assign five digit codes for internal purposes until the transition to the GNIS Feature ID is completed following the 2010 census, at which time the codes will be no longer assigned or used. Until then but no later, Census codes will be available. Legacy systems are highly encouraged to convert to the Feature ID as soon as possible. See FIPS 55 Change Notice. (Note: FIPS 6-4 State and county codes are separate codes and are NOT affected by this change.) "FIPS 55 codes" (HTML). United States Geological Survey. http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/download_data.htm. 

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