More than 50% of National Weather Service (NWS) severe weather Watch, Warning, and Advisory products contain coding and/or formatting errors that impede, and sometimes prevent, automated dissemination of essential information to the broadcast public.  This presentation addresses that situation.

Lack of nationwide standard practice in formatting severe weather products, along with coding errors, are long-term problems for those NWS customers who deal with products from more than a single NWS office.  This is especially true for the many broadcasters who now use computers to filter, sort, or otherwise process these NWS products for direct presentation to the public.  Even when NWS formatting policy appears to be documented, in the form Weather Service Operations Manuals (WSOMs) and/or Operations Manual Letters (OMLs), fewer than half of the severe weather products issued conform to the published documentation.  There are wide variations in practice among the NWS Regions, from one NWS office to another, and sometimes even within a single NWS office.

Specific dissemination issues addressed are:

·       Lack of explicit and unambiguous NWS policy with respect to product format standards, and failure of the NWS to provide adequate clarification and/or interpretation of incomplete or ambiguous documentation.

·       Absence of real-time quality monitoring and control by the NWS of severe weather products transmitted, particularly with respect to coding errors and format compliance.

·       Failure of OML 1-98 (April 1998) to achieve nationwide format standardization of Tornado Warning (TOR), Severe Thunderstorm Warning (SVR), and Flash Flood Warning (FFW) products.

·       Failure of OML 4-98 (June 1998) to achieve nationwide format standardization of Winter Storm (WSW) and Non-Precipitation (NPW) products.

·       Failure of WSOM C-22 (October 2001) to achieve nationwide format standardization of Flood Warning (FLW) and FFW products.

·       Lack of any nationwide standard for formatting and identification of TEST products.

·       De-facto standards that are often defined by the NWS software implementation, rather than by the WSOMs and/or OMLs.

·       NWS software implementations that allow local offices to modify standard product formats, and NWS policies that apparently permit this practice.

·       NWS software implementations that allow forecasters to manually modify any component of a product, including computer-composed headers, along with NWS policies that apparently permit them to do so.

·       Dissemination problems created by the widespread practice of local NWS offices subverting standardization by implementing their own unique formatting and coding forms.

This presentation documents these problems in considerable detail, examines some of the reasons behind them, suggests several reasonable solutions, and concludes with an urgent request for the NWS to actually do something to address them.  Audience participation is encouraged.