ASHINGTON, Nov. 24 — An expert panel that includes some of the government's leading emergency managers has recommended the creation of a high-technology national warning system that would alert the public to emergencies, including terrorist attacks and other crises.

In a report scheduled to be made public on Monday, the group said that the government's current emergency warning systems were inefficient and outdated, and that a new integrated system should be the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security.

While the group did not call for the end of the color-coded terrorism alert system created in March by the White House, it did note that there was widespread public confusion over the system.

The group, which calls itself the Partnership for Public Warning and includes representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the American Red Cross, said the current hodgepodge of emergency warning systems "do not reach most of the people at risk."

"We believe that the new Department of Homeland Security should take responsibility for leading development of a national all-hazard public warning architecture," the group said. "The need for such a system is considered extremely compelling."

President Bush is scheduled on Monday to sign the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security and to announce that he will nominate Tom Ridge, now the White House domestic security adviser, to be the department's first secretary. The department would formally open its doors in late January.

A spokesman for Mr. Ridge, Gordon Johndroe, said today that the administration was already studying the nation's emergency warning systems.

"Since Sept. 11, we've been looking at the most effective ways to alert people to the terrorism threat," Mr. Johndroe said. "We are in the process of working with a variety of industries, their associations, as well as media organizations and government entities."

The group's report, which grew out of a conference among the emergency managers last June, noted that the federal warning system known as the Emergency Alert System was a vestige of the cold war and had been "designed to allow the president to warn the entire nation of major events such as an incoming enemy missile with a nuclear warhead."

The group suggested that a new system could allow the government to issue warnings of terrorist attacks and other threats via telephone, cellphone, television and radio, possibly through computer chips embedded in the devices.

"Warnings about events seconds, minutes or hours away need to be disseminated rapidly through special warning systems," the group said. "At 2 a.m., traditional communications channels are simply ineffective."

The chairman of the panel, Peter Ward, a retired seismologist with the United States Geological Survey, said in an interview that much of the technology needed to create a national alert system already existed. "We're not talking about big money; we're not talking about big government," Mr. Ward said.

He said the need for the system had grown immensely since the Sept. 11 attacks and that the government needed to find a way on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, even person-by-person, basis to alert the public to imminent threats.

"Our vision down the road is that every person at risk from natural disaster, an accident or terrorism would get a heads-up," he said. "Every piece of electronics you own — be it a cellphone, a car phone, a computer, a radio, a television — should have the ability of giving you that heads-up."

He said the possibility that terrorists might use weapons of mass destruction on American soil should increase the urgency to create a technically advanced system.

"It's not hard to think of many scenarios with weapons of mass destruction where, if you can get to people right away and tell them to get out of harm's way, you can save thousands of lives," he said. "Our ability to do that at the moment is almost nonexistent. What worries me is that one of these days, an event like that will happen and thousands of people will die, and they didn't need to."