[EAS] After incident EAS reviews - Hurricane Ida

[Sean Donelan]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2021, Dave Kline wrote:
 I need schoolin'.

There is a difference between NOAA Directives and what the public 
believes. This is one of those things where NOAA/NWS painted itself into a 
corner, and has been trying to work itself out of the corner.

Social science research and public surveys indicate the public views an 
"Emergency" is the most severe alert level.  But NOAA/NWS used "Emergency" 
as one of the lowest severity levels.

https://www.nws.noaa.gov/directives/sym/pd01017010curr.pdf

Several years ago, NWS needed a way to communicate to the public when 
there was an especially severe tornado warning, and started to use the 
term "tornado emergency" for especially destructive or catastrophic 
tornado swarms.  In this case, a tornado emergency is a higher severity 
level than a tornado warning.

But to make things even more confusing, NWS distributed "tornado 
emergencies" as special weather "statements" (the lowest alert 
severity).  If you have a full-time meteorologist on-staff, or pay for a 
commercial weather alerting system, you'll see "tornado emergencies."  If 
you only rely on EAS, you probably won't.

Confused yet?

Flash flood emergencies are the same thing, but for destructive flash 
flood warnings.  And it looks like the distribution of flash flood 
emergency messages is just as confused as tornado emergency messages.

Yes, I know the folks at NOAA/NWS deal with a lot of legacy systems, and 
are doing their best to make things work with what they have.  And 
sometimes you can see the duct tape holding everything together.