[EAS] USVI and PR: polygons versus political boundaries

[Robert Bunge - NOAA Federal]

My own observation is emergency alerting dissemination systems are usually behind - a decade or more - the data the warning systems can produce.  The prime example being how long it took many dissemination systems to take full advantage of the NWS polygons (with all their issues here and there).

This tropical season is a watershed event representing the future of public alerting... and sets off another technology cycle.  All those on this list involved in alerting dissemination systems should be paying attention to what is happening even as we speak.

With Harvey and Irma, NWS has released the very first gridded based warnings... the storm surge warnings.  See the graphics on the NHC page for Irma.  NWS has issued forecasts for 2.5x2.5km grids for over a decade.  Now that technology and science is being used for storm surge watches and warnings.  Not only do these products represent high data density, high geographic resolution, but in their raw technical form provide data that will be very challenging for dissemination systems to marry up with words needed to make people take action (in this case height of the surge for a grid point).  While in theory you can boil these grids into polygons, it is a complex process that can create many complex, confusing, polygons.  NWS has struggled with these and another issues on the dissemination side of the house over the past few months.

The scientists are racing ahead with what the science can deliver with little regards as to if the dissemination systems can deliver.  IMHO, this is a challenge the dissemination community should step up and take on.

Expect gridded warnings to have a big place in the future decade.  Even now, NWS is working on a set of non-tropical storm surge gridded products.  Expect to see this technology applied to other warnings in the future - bands of snow for example.   And it doesn't end there.

Google NOAA OAR FACETS to glimpse a future that is approaching;  high resolution - 1km grids representing, for example, areas under threat for flash flood or tornado warnings, refreshed every three minutes (about the volume scan time for the WSR-88D radar), with each grid point having data that represents not only meteorological data, but probability threshold data.   Meaning even before the warning arrives, data is available that provides the customer a representation of the threat.  So a hospital manager who needs more time to move patients will have a different threshold (say 30 percent) as to when to take action then the homeowner (say 95 percent) who is engrossed in their most recent TV show binge and only needs a minute to head downstairs. 

Cheers,

Bob Bunge

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 12:34 AM, Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com> wrote:
>On Thu, 7 Sep 2017, Botterell, Arthur at CalOES wrote:
>>Not everything that's unfamiliar is bad, Sean.

>I guess you miseed where the "simplified" polygons cut-off large chunks of the islands. If a warning systems used those coordinates on parts of the islands (such as WEA cell towers), it would have missed several sections of the islands.

>Sometimes implementations of good ideas are badly done.

>Ignoring problems doesn't fix them.

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