Proactive risk mitigation through the use of dynamic, geo-located, high-resolution alerts based on short-term hail forecasts

As the leading provider of highly localized and personalized weather forecasting, Weather Central, LP is committed to developing products that provide users with the information needed to make property- and life-saving decisions in the event of hazardous weather. Beginning in 2000, Weather Central implemented email notifications for county-based weather alerts. By 2004, patented technology was in place to further localize personal weather notifications. In this phase, Weather Central made it possible to move from countywide alerts for all weather events, to alerts for specific storms that matched an individual user's criteria, such as the type of storm and if it will impact their address-specific locations. Users could also choose how they were alerted, such as by e-mail, wireless device, or a blinking computer tray icon. In 2009, Weather Central launched a successful iPhone/iPod Touch application that included high-quality, interactive radar. At this same time, alerting based on National Weather Service polygons was being implemented, to reduce false-alarm notifications. By 2010, GPS-based polygonal push notifications were being sent to all users with the Weather Central iPhone/iPod Touch application.

In addition to advancing the technology of localized, personal severe weather alerts, Weather Central has been employing algorithms from the Warning Decision Support System – Integrated Information (WDSS-II) developed by the National Severe Storms Laboratory and the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, since 2005 in the broadcast arena. In 2008, the WDSS-II products were made available to customers outside the world of broadcast media. As such, the most recent phase of severe weather alerting from Weather Central, combines the patented personalized alerting technology with 1 km severe weather products from WDSS-II. In this new venture, WDSS-II is used to create storm motion estimates into the future every five minutes. Weather Central takes this one step further by applying the WDSS-II Maximum Expected Hail Size product to the forecasted storm motion, in order to create a forecasted hail swath. Once the path of hazardous weather is known, Weather Central's patented technology compares the forecasted storm path to the alerting criteria indicated in the user's personal profile. If the alerting criteria are met, notifications are sent out as SMS messages, emails and/or phone calls. This presentation will feature a detailed discussion of this dynamically updating, localized, high-resolution alerting technology and how it can be used to reduce false alarms and mitigate risk to life and property. It should be noted that while this technology is currently being used to alert users of hail and lightning threats, it is Weather Central's hope that it will be expanded to many different severe and non-severe weather scenarios in the future.