[EAS] Improving weather alerts on WEA mobile devices

[Sean Donelan]

I have a suggestion for improving weather alerts on WEA.  Wait... I know, 
why weather alerts and the standards organizations hate changing 
standards.

Now is a good time because the National Weather Service is already engaged 
in hazard warning simplification and is meeting about it next month. Of 
the 7,190 WEA messages in 2017, about 6,725 WEA messages were 
meteorological. The National Weather Service is the biggest source of WEA 
messages. Some of NWS alerts are important for the public at home. But 
most weather warnings are aimed at travelers getting home or work. There 
isn't a good reason to mobile devices to sound the WEA Alarm in the middle 
of the night waking people up at home for travel weather warnings. It just 
annoys them and causes them to turn off all WEA warnings.

About channging standards. The WEA standards based on the original 
Commercial Mobile Service Alert Advisory Committee work in 2006, encode 
WEA messages based on CAP Severity ("Extreme", "Severe"), Urgency 
("Immediate", "Expected") and Certainty ("Observed", "Likely"). Although 
part of the CMAS/WEA and 3GPP standards since the beginning, in practice 
the CAP Certainty code ("Observed", "Likely") has no practical effect in 
the US or any other country's WEA system. Worse, it's confusing for alert 
originators, so they just use the maximum for all the CAP values. Re-using 
the same CMAS/3GPP code values maintains backward compatibility, while 
coming up with a more using definition for the "Certainty" value. Its less 
of a change than creating new 3GPP codepoints.

Because Weather Alerts are the biggest contributor to WEA, I propose 
exchanging the CAP Certainty with the CAP Category "Met" (i.e. 
meteorological) for WEA weather alerts. Coding WEA messages would enable 
the mobile end-users to display or opt-out of categories of weather 
warnings, instead of disabling all types of warnings. Or get "Extreme" 
weather warnings like tornados critical for people at home, while not 
getting woken up with travel warnings.

For more details, I also filed comments on the FCC website:
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/10225567322840