FIPS county codes were also used by the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and NOAA Weather Radio (NWR) to define geographic locations for their SAME-based public alerting systems.[4] In this application, a "0" (zero) is added as the first digit and used as a "placeholder", making each FIPS code a six-digit sequence. In the future, the first digit may be utilized in this numerical scheme to represent a predefined county subdivision.[5]