Implementation of standardized headlines in winter weather text bulletins by the National Weather Service (Formerly paper 12.2)

NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) issues a suite of winter weather products under one text bulletin to provide the Nation advance notice of hazardous winter weather events for the protection of life and property. Occasionally, forecasters issue more than one headline in one segment of a multi-segmented winter weather text bulletin to indicate when the significance level of the winter weather event changes, or when two or more hazardous events occur for the same geographical area. Weather providers and vendors decode our winter weather watch, warning and/or advisory headlines and automatically generate graphics and text crawls to be relayed to the general public.

The NWS is planning to implement a standardized method of ordering multiple headlines and displaying key headline elements in winter storm text bulletins for the 2004/2005 winter season. The standardized headline format will help improve automated dissemination of winter weather information to the public. This presentation will describe the standardized headline format and show when our customers can expect multiple headlines in winter weather text bulletins.