[EAS] NWS SQWs and RWTs

[Gregory Muir]

Recently the local National Weather Service office has been firing off snow squall alerts (SQW).  These events are obviously rejected by ENDECS given they are not on the FCC approved list of event codes.

 

I contacted the local NWS office and talked with the warning meteorologist and reminded them that broadcasters do not carry these event warnings.  I was told that they only wanted to warn those drivers that are on the roads and that there was no need to warn other concerns.

 

This area is primarily farming and ranching.  Since cell phone coverage can be very spotty the people in these businesses rely heavily on radio to receive their news, weather and other programming.  And it is a  given that they will be driving up and down back roads tending to their livestock, etc. on a daily basis so any weather warnings would be helpful for them.

 

NWS weather warnings on cell phones around here are not very reliable given coverage and system issues.  Receipt of these messages on my phone seem to happen around 50 per cent of the time.  But radio and television broadcasts of these events is very reliable.

 

I tried to program a SQW event code into a Sage ENDEC and found that it did not work.  I contacted Sage and was told that in the firmware they changed from a modifiable event code table to a fixed one only reflecting the FCC authorized codes. A no-go here.

 

NWS RWTs - back in 2024 the NWS changed the event duration for their RWTs from 6 hours to 24  hours for reasons unknown.  I contacted the Salt Lake NWS headquarters and inquired as to why they did this.  The answer was that it was just the way they do things with no real reason.  Since broadcasters usually send RWTs and RMTs with event durations on the order of one or two hours I made that mention and still received the same answer.  Anybody know why??

 

Greg