[EAS] National Weather Service Message Flooding

[John Willkie]

It seems to me that identifying weather emergencies by county or county subdivision (of any type) is a VERY bad idea.  While the NWS may respect county boundaries, their measures appear to be antiquated and extremely coarse.
 
Weather emergencies are dynamic and simply they do not respect geographic, toplogical or political boundaries.  A system that alerts based on such arbitrary boundaries will always result in false triggers (which will tend to be ignored) and viewer/listener fatigue, such as in my area when there are severe thunderstorm warnings (recently I saw two in the same newscast) for areas of my county in the desert, two ecosystems and almost 100 miles away from the bulk of the county population.
 
I see two ideal approaches.  The first is dynamic polygons.  For severe thunderstorms, the first area to identify is the actual area where the rain is falling.  A second set of polygons could identify the actual affected watersheds, since water tends to flow downhill into watersheds.  Perhaps even a third set of polygons identifying areas where fires have eradicated some or all of the underbrush "mud warnings."
 
Tornadoes and even hurricanes should be identified by central coordinates: lat and long, the date/time, and the time, distance and vector since the last report.  That way, people can adjust their travel to drive around bad weather that could affect their travel. 
 
Many people today travel with devices in their car or on their person which tell them their current geographical coordinates.  "Simple" spherical geometric calculations can inform the user how far away they are from the danger, and in which direction the trouble is traveling.   I am not suggesting that humans will commonly make direct use of this information.
 
The ATSC Non-Real-Time (NRT) specification http://www.atsc.org/cms/standards/a_103-2012.pdf incorporates much of the requirements of such an approach as one of the three methods to target receivers:  ss-ccc (FIPS state/county numbers), postal code, and shape/circular area (x-y+radius).  See page 10.  The first two approaches were already in the OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) BCAST SG (Service Guide) standard used in many cell phones.  
 
I had a small hand in inclusion of the lat/long+radius approach into the NRT standard. Too many alerts today assume the viewer or listener has deep knowledge of local topology and place names. 

John Willkie johnwillkie at hotmail.com johnwillkie at etherguidesystems.com
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