[EAS] concerning the request for new weather Event Codes

[Sean Donelan]

On Wed, 22 Jun 2016, Dave Kline wrote:
> I see your point Sean,
> I agree with you about warning strategy being and issue in some cases, but also see that there needs to be some flexibility for NWS warnings. I think limiting NWS to one alert every couple of hours, is not the best answer either.
> We just end up doing what we have complained about the FCC doing to us.
> That is to make us all work within a "one size fits all" EAS template.

Its about setting expectations and goals, not the specific numeric 
details.

And within those goals, there will always be exceptions. Exceptions 
should be exceptions, not the regular course of business.

EAS boxes have a two-minute time limit, because sometimes you need to
set a number to buid the box, even though some rare emergencies might be 
better with a 5 minute time limit and other emergencies would work with a 
1 minute time limit.  All specifications are somewhat arbitrary.  Trying 
to make everything custom-fit, and rejecting "one size fits all" sometimes 
ends up being very expensive and nothing works together because everything
is different.

Weather forecasters have gotten pretty good at predicting severe weather 
in a region in the next couple of hours (again, aribtrary, could be 60 
minutes, could be 4 hours, whatever the experts at NWS think is 
appropriate).  They may not be able to predict the street address where a 
tornado will touch down, but the combination of severe thunderstorm, 
flood, flash flood, special marine warnings always seem to be issued 
together. Tornado emergencies usually cover multiple twisters in a 
region over a few hours, instead of separate tornado warnings for 
individual twisters.

Broadcasters with in-house meteorologists already do this for their 
programming, they break-into programming a few times an hour and cover
all the active alerts (or they go wall-to-wall coverage).  But fewer and 
fewer broadcaster stations and almost no cable systems have in-house 
meteorlogists or news staff.  The EAS box runs on auto-pilot.  If the 
expectation is the NWS will issue 40-50 EAS messages for a severe
weather event, very few broadcasters or cable systems will choose to 
configure their EAS boxes to interrupt programming that often 
automatically.

I don't know how many resources the NWS, each national cable operator, and 
each national broadcast group has.  Maybe they have enough resources
to create different custom policies for every weather office.  But if
broadcasters and cable systems had that many resources, you wouldn't need 
to run your EAS box in automatic mode.  You could just have your station's 
professional meteorlogists and news staff cover the severe weather.