[EAS] concerning the request for new weather Event Codes

[Sean Donelan]

On Wed, 22 Jun 2016, Tim Stoffel wrote:
> Out of curiosity, if you had your way, what would the text of a severe 
> thunderstorm warning be like? Or, a tornado warning?

The National Weather Service does an excellent job on individual warnings
and alerts.  The construction of individual message are generally clear 
and provide useful information.

The challenge is a warning strategy over the course of an entire event 
(an afternoon or day).

The National Weather Service may send 40-60 warnings and messages as
a severe weather event moves across an area. Each message template is 
usually about 90 seconds and in isolation makes sense.  But 40-60 
warnings tends to be repetitive as the storm slowly moves a few miles. NWS 
made the decision to make warning areas smaller, but the result is now 
more programming interruptions. This may make sense for dedicated Weather 
Radio programming, but interrupting a broadcast or cable systems every 
5-10 minutes as a storm moves a few miles further doesn't.

As NWS has increased the number of highly specific warnings and alerts, 
fewer broadcasters and cable systems seem to forward those warnings.

Instead of lots of extremely specific weather event codes, maybe NWS 
should have a general "emergency weather warning" code to consolidate 
multiple active warnings in an area in a single programming interrupt 
(e.g. goal of no more than one 90 second message during a 2 hour period)
for broadcast/cable systems, instead of many interruptions for every
thing that happen during severe weather.  Weather radio could still carry 
lots of individual warnings.