[BC] EAS Question

[Mike McCarthy]

Staring last year, the NWS starting including projected arrival times 
within the projected storm progress cone. I had one instance where the NWS 
had three ACTIVE TOR's covering different parts of the county and those 
around it.  All had differing expiration times and included projected paths 
and towns which overlapped at times.  This was a HUGE change from the all 
county warnings of yesteryear.

No, they don't issue SAME codes follow-ups for the same reason we don't 
send them all the time.  Jaded public.

The new warning message for this year includes a comment about the Doppler 
radar indication and that a tornado could be on the ground.  Their 
reasoning is safer than sorry. We had one last year which was on the ground 
invisibly for a few miles except for the damage it did before the twister 
really became ground coupled and stirred up the soil.

Then lets not forget the period when spotting is next to useless or 
impossible: Dark/overnight or extremely low visibilities common in high 
precipitation thunderstorms where the tornado is completely shrouded by a 
heavy rain shaft.  The Plainfield 1990 tornado was one such twister.  There 
is no video of it at maturity because no one saw it other than when it 
initially formed 30 minutes earlier.

MM

At 01:48 PM 3/8/2009 -0400, Powell Way wrote

>On Mar 8, 2009, at 1:41 PM, Larry Fuss wrote:
>>Not in my experience.  If a warning is issued for Smith County, that's the
>>end of it.  There are NEVER any follow-up warnings that say "the tornado is
>>on the ground and headed for the trailer park at the edge of town."
>
>Then the storm dissipated. Often some warnings will give paths. If no 
>additonal warning is given, the storm dissipated. Tornadoes, 
>generally,  are very short lived events. Often the warning is for a 
>"doppler indicated" tornado. That means there may be a tornado forming, 
>and it may not ever get to the ground. You can't have spotters everywhere, 
>and the radar CAN NOT tell what is actually occurring at ground level!