[EAS] National Weather Service Message Flooding

[Mike McCarthy]

Eric,

One of the challenges which I believe there is a simple solution in 
terms of larger unified SVR events, such a squall lines, derecho's, and 
bow echos, is to in fact outline entire counties in a polygon if the 
event is forecast to move through the entire county over time. The 
current manner of defining the polygon based on some fixed expected time 
of passage is what creates the partial county polygons and requires a 
2nd or more warnings for the same county. As part of the "all county 
encompassing" warning, the text can include expected times of passage 
for given areas in the later time of the warning.

It's terribly frustrating when the same county see's three or more 
different same type warnings for the same large scale event. That's N-1 
the number of times I should be woken up at night for the same storm 
system moving through one county in a metro.

It's a bit different when SVR, TOR and then FFW all come out in the same 
event. It's happened here more than once in the same county within the 
past couple years. Those are specifically targeted area messages and 
flooding on those is inevitable lest the NWS regin in their policies on 
issuing warnings based on WSR-88d algorithm alarming and estimated 
rainfall data.

MM

On 9/27/2013 11:11 AM, Eric Adler wrote:
> 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.
>