[EAS] National Weather Service Message Flooding

[Ed Czarnecki]

An FCC CSRIC working group that I co-chaired examined this and related
questions several months ago.  As suggested in the CSRIC report, creating
unique message ID's in the EAS header could be a way to handle a type of
message flooding.  Such a message ID would conceivably add another filtering
criteria to weed out message duplicates (same audio, different header).
This header could be included in legacy EAS as a minor addition to the
header FSKs (page 33 of the CSRIC report linked below outlines problem cases
and four potential resolutions.  

HOWEVER, there is a significant issue of whether NWS systems can be modified
to include such a new message ID.   We were informed of significant
technical, operational and budgetary impediments to doing this any time in
the near future, if at all.  Please see section 6.4 (Duplicate Message
Handling) in the related report here:
http://transition.fcc.gov/bureaus/pshs/advisory/csric3/CSRIC_III_WG9_Report_
March_%202013.pdf.

Edward Czarnecki, PhD 
Senior Director – Strategy, Development & Regulatory Affairs
www.monroe-electronics.com

-----Original Message-----
From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On
Behalf Of Eric Adler

I don't believe that the long-term solution to "message flooding" is a major
change in NWS alerting policies.  

>From what I understand, NOAA's current policy is to alert based upon the
storm/event and create bounding boxes as it moves and issue the alert for
those bounding boxes.  This may create multiple activations of SIMILAR (not
identical even though the message text may be) warnings for the same FIPS
during large and complex storms/events.  They could move to FIPS based
warning on the NWS side but that reduces the usefulness of more advanced and
hypertargeted technologies like WEA (nee CMAS).  

I believe some other viable options for reducing "message flooding" are: (1)
Advanced filtering in encoder/decoder boxes at relays so that a relaying
station can make rules on how many XYZ alerts for FIPS ###### will be
relayed in n minutes (or similar or even more advanced); (2) Similar
filtering for FIPS but have this take place at the NWS side (for broadcast
and broadcast-feeds only) so that those crafting the warnings can decide if
they want to merge multiple alerts to be succinct or keep them separate to
best warn the public; (3) a rethinking of the method with which we deliver
alerts to the 'end user'; (4) a combination of the above.  Surely there are
other viable options and I'd love to hear them. 

- Eric

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