[EAS] Blue Alerts Are Back

[Mike McCarthy]

The people that need to know about this concern at the NWS know.  The
challenge is to balance this issue against the interests of all the other
consumers across the weather enterprise which have different information
needs.

In areas where severe weather and SVR's are common, such messages are part
of the landscape and most people don't react to them anyway. However,
where SVR's are not common, that's a tougher assessment to decide on
airing a call to action product which has a history of being serial over a
short period of time.

This is why we're talking about a broadcast friendly product which
minimizes the intrusion duration. If we can get a source side product into
the EAS box in a manner which doesn't require years of code writing and
tests, then it may be possible to revisit this with management by stating
there will no longer be multiple 2 minute messages for a line of summer
thunderstorms during afternoon drive. 30 seconds and out.

This is especially applicable to TOR's and FFW's which are highly perishable.

Door bell and serve.

Another is to challenge sales to turn weather alerts into revenue. Get a
local insurance broker, contractor, and/or roofer to sponsor severe
weather messages and run 15 second reads every break during those
episodes.

"Severe weather messages are brought to you by Ed's Roofing. Call us to
repair your hail or high wind damage. 222-555-8888. Ed's Roofing."

---Just don't run them adjacent to the EAS messages themselves.

MM

>> Particularly with SVR's where any number of them are issued for the
>> same regional/metro area as storms progress. After any number of
>> separate warnings for the same cell(s) and/or line, it gets really
>> old...fast.
>
> The question really is: who is going to
> make the effort to do outreach to solve the problem? Remember, most every