[EAS] NWS Blue Alerts & Partial County Warnings

[Gary Timm]

>From the NWS Aware e-Newsletter March 2019

Two Major Updates Coming for NWR and the EAS
By Tim Schott, NWS Dissemination Services, Timothy.Schott at noaa.gov

NWS is planning two major changes involving NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards (NWR) and the Emergency Alert System (EAS).

Blue Alerts:
The first major dissemination change involves NWS conveying Blue Alerts over NWR and to the EAS. Blue Alerts, with an EAS Event Code of BLU, are the most recent message category authorized by the FCC for broadcast via EAS. Blue Alerts are used by state and local authorities to warn the public when there is actionable information related to a law enforcement officer who is missing, seriously injured, killed in the line of duty or when there is an imminent credible threat to an officer.
Broadcasters' encoder/decoder equipment is now ready to process the new event code. Over the next year, a number of state emergency communications committees and state broadcasters associations will update their state EAS plans to allow dissemination of Blue Alerts. NWS is now working aggressively to update multiple systems, such as NWR, to disseminate Blue Alerts when requested by authorized alerting officials. We expect WFOs to have this capability by the end of 2019 or early 2020.

Partial County Warnings:
The second change incorporates Partial County Warnings in NWR and EAS as a future operational capability for all NWS Weather Forecast Offices (WFO).
For many years, NWS has received feedback about "too many EAS activations" associated with NWS warnings. Many broadcasters monitor
NWR as one source for the warnings they convey to EAS. One of the challenges for the nation's EAS is that, in most cases, alerts are conveyed
on a whole-county basis.
The FCC's Part 11 rules and current NWS policy allow NWS to send alerts via NWR Specific Area Message encoding (SAME) and EAS for pre-defined county partitions. Broadcasters are required to have EAS equipment that can process partial county warnings. Four WFOs (Duluth, MN; Glasgow, MT; Rapid City, SD; and Tucson, AZ) have been successfully partitioning one or more of their counties for NWR and EAS for many years. Because there are no immediate plans to disseminate warnings by polygon via NWR or EAS, NWS would like to provide all WFOs with this capability.
The use of partial county warnings is particularly beneficial for counties that are geographically large, oddly shaped or comprised of non-contiguous areas, such as islands. WFOs would still be able to alert entire counties. Partial county warnings could also be used for the dissemination of non-weather
emergency messages.
It will likely take some time for this operational capability to be extended to all WFOs. However, any implementation of partial county warnings must be thoroughly vetted and coordinated among state emergency communications committees, state broadcaster associations, emergency managers, state and local government officials and NWS and preceded by comprehensive public education and outreach efforts.
If there is interest in further exploring whether partial county alerting might be helpful in targeting warning messages for a specific county, please contact your local WCM or me for additional information.