[EAS] Improving weather alerts on WEA mobile devices

[Robert Bunge]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 3:12 PM Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com> wrote:
 
>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.

I don't understand this.  I'm going to guess the majority of NWS' WEAs are for flash floods, followed by Tornado warnings.  FFW's certainly have an important home target audience.  Waking someone up in the middle of the night for a TOR or FFW (also realize WEA would have been triggered during the levee breech during Katrina, or any damn break) is pretty critical.

>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

I guess I'm not following why the category, which NWS already populates with "Met" couldn't be used without any changes.

I think you are actually proposing that FCC require end user devices to add a Met category and allow opt-out.  I know in the past round of discussion, NWS asked FCC to look at standardization of the end user devices interface and or options.  NWS experience had been the differences in options in the WEA application was a source of end user confusion and exposed NWS to a more complex support environment when the public sought out help from the NWS.

The full U-S-C suite, IMHO, offers a rich future one day, when NWS gets to the point where even a seemly low level alert like a Winter Storm Advisory could be set to trigger WEA if the event was going to have a major impact, an example being light snow causing slippery roads right at rush hour in a large metro area.

Bob Bunge