[EAS] After incident EAS reviews - Hurricane Ida

[Dave Kline]

Thanks for the schoolin' Sean.
I guess leave it to the gov't to figure out the best way to cause confusion.

I've always been puzzled by tornado "severity."
First off, a small one will kill you just as dead as a big one, or take the roof off your house just as well.

E.F. (Enhanced Fujita) Scale (I remember before it was Enhanced) is based on how much damage a tornado does, correct? Based on that, the world's biggest twister out in the middle of nowhere gets a low EF rating, where a smaller storm in high population density gets a bigger number.
Assuming I remembered this correctly, that means the the EF rating does not necessarily correlate to the size of the storm? At least hurricanes have some basis in wind speed. Please school me again, if I got this wrong. Fujita vs Enhanced Fujita, Emergency vs Warning. It seems like the rules of the game keep shifting. Is it any wonder we're confused?

'Round these parts it's almost a badge of honor to have been impacted by a tornado. People get upset to learn their storm damage was only due to straight-line winds. When us old-timers reminisce about the big one that ripped through the middle of town back in the 70's we recall two things. Where we were at the time, and the guy who got killed because he got up on his roof for a better view.
Maybe it doesn't matter much what you call the thing. Some will take shelter, others will go out for a look anyway. Maybe the gov't just figures Darwin can sort it all out.

FYI... the Warning Coordinator at our local NWS office has plates on his car that say... EF5.
I think that's pretty cool.

On Tue, Sep 7, 2021 at 11:16 AM Sean Donelan sean at donelan.com wrote:
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.

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Dave Kline - Solder Jockey
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