[EAS] An Open "Letter" to the National Weather Service - now postedon the EAS Forum

[Eric Adler]

This is all quite interesting since we had an issue with a large squall line system that came through the area and dropped tornadoes on communities that we cover:

While the regional NWS' alerting area nearly mimics the coverage area of all of our services, each of their transmitters only carries alerts for its own little slice of that area (plus a little overlap).  Where the first tornado dropped is at a point just beyond the edge and we did not receive the TOR for it from the NWS transmitter that we monitor until it (the TOR) crossed into the next county.  We did have an announcer that was aware of the storm who went on-air to notify the public.  (The TOR warnings continued as the squall line moved through the rest of our coverage area, including right over our studios where we took shelter but luckily there was no further tornado.)  

Once NWS's CAP feeds are able to be 'received' and utilized by our Sage, we will be able to much better serve our listeners/viewers and the region as we will have *more* alerts.  

Granted, our local NWS guys do a great job of not issuing alerts without good reason and I'm aware that this is not the case everywhere.  

Eric

****
We (speaking as an LP1) don't know what downstream stations are actually
monitoring, or what the condition of their equipment might be. We have
to assume a role as a redundant relay station for NWS, in case someone's
NOAA weather receiver is inoperative.
****