[EAS] Humans thwart disaster alerts - - URL

[Mike McCarthy]

I don't believe the two-tone signal is mandatory except for EAN and NPT. 
It's otherwise optional. If I'm wrong, rule citation please.

As for the blast once, warn multiple times, we did that with EBS when I
was at KGRC, Hannibal, MO. in the mid-late 80's. We were the CPCS-1 for NE
Mo. One afternoon/evening when the NWS issued a dozen severe thunderstorm
warnings, the EBS tones got to be obnoxious really quick during the heart
of PM drive.

After consulting with downstream stations and AHJ's who monitored us, we
decided to alert only on the first SVR warning issued for an event. The
use of the EBS was the proverbial "door bell" alerting everyone to pay
attention to what's going on around you.  Think of it as a stronger,
higher level, "it's starting to happen" watch.

We still used the tones for all TOR's and FFW's given their short term
hazards and impacts.

Doing away with the two-tone attention signal on all second and subsequent
SVR's would go a long way towards shortening the interruptions on this
100KW regional.

As for the NWS wanting to streamline products, I considered that in my
suggestion to NWS about a broadcast friendly message format for SVR, TOR,
and FFW. The text would remain the same for the important elements (what,
where, when) and repeated for clarity. The broadcast friendly message
would do away with the list of impact locations and advisory portions of
the message.

The goal is to create that door bell to get people's attention, give the
just what they need, and move on...

Now a comment was made earlier about counties not being important and
locations being more important.  Under the current system, counties are
what we have to work with in an automated environment.  Unless the system
changes to something more like zipcodes where the spatial areal outline is
finer in resolution, we need to work within the established framework. 
Never the less, visitors will not local zip codes either.

MM.

On Mon, October 2, 2017 9:50 pm, Botterell, Arthur at CalOES wrote:
>
> Here's another thing... right now every time we activate EAS we have to
> go through many seconds of tones and data bursts, which make the
> interruption that much more obnoxious.  Might it make sense to seek a
> rules change to eliminate the two-tone part, which no longer has any
> technical function I'm aware of?   Maybe not on the first alert sounding,