In an Industry With No Standards, How Can We Create a Better Process?

The explosive growth of electronic communications has had both positive and negative effects on the public's options for receiving severe weather warnings.

In 1985, NOAA weather radio started proactively “pushing” NWS short-fuse attention-getting warnings at the county level. In the past 10 years, traditional “emergency telephone notification” companies and SMS content providers started including county-wide warning delivery to their offerings. Commonly these companies have no severe weather expertise regarding the potential impact their policies and procedures could have on public safety.

A proliferation of private sector notification companies who deliver severe weather warnings has occurred. Currently this emerging industry is completely unfettered by minimum capacity or performance standards requirements for delivering very short-fused severe weather warnings when seconds literally count. SMS text message content providers commonly set maximum number of message delivery quotas so as to not possibly exceed user's text plans and cause “overage” charges. Telephone notification companies have been documented to limit the total number of severe weather warning calls per hour to protect their cost to deliver the product, completely ignoring the possible impact on public safety.

Local public safety officials, especially in tornado-prone areas, are hungry for methods to be able to warn their citizens of impending weather danger as older siren attrition leaves them with few options they can incorporate into their restricted budgets. Public safety officials frequently lack the knowledge of what technical questions they should be asking vendors regarding measurable, timely delivery performance. Many have unknowingly entered into service agreements promising severe weather warning telephone notification which is simply not possible within 2-3 minutes of issuance to large volumes of local phone numbers because of limitations of their local telephone companies. Sadly, incidences of latent warning delivery or complete failure to deliver any warnings are increasingly on the rise.

Any sort of content can be freely added to electronically disseminated weather warnings such as a telemarketing or advertisement message, distracting the recipient when seconds count. The delivery of private-sector issued severe weather “opinions” while official NWS warnings are occurring is another very dangerous source of public confusion. Companies engaging the services of private sector weather companies who deliver site-specific warnings based on analysis of clients unique weather vulnerabilities should be encouraged by professionals in the weather enterprise. Imposing free, non-NWS issued warnings wholesale to the general public that don't understand the difference, is contributing to confusion and the eventual “tuning out” of NWS warnings.

Statistics collected by WeatherCall's extensive archived database demonstrates that the public who consumes TIMELY polygon-based warnings have developed expectations of severe weather occurring when they are warned, and of NO severe weather immediately impacting them when they are NOT. The public do not understand that there are enterprise ventures in the marketplace that either do not currently use address-specific, polygon driven methodology, and/or lack the ability to deliver warnings in an extremely rapid method. WeatherCall continues to express interest in partnering with qualified researchers who can measure this vast data resource which documents important severe weather behavioral patterns.

Gradual progress made in gaining public trust in storm-based warnings is now being compromised with the implementation of WEA/CMAS in 2012. An information hungry public is demanding more local and accurate warnings. County-wide warnings, cross-referenced to cell tower footprints are producing very timely delivery of SMS text short-fuse warnings, but grossly lack site-specificity. Warning accuracy and public trust may revert back to a pre-1985 level as a result. WEA/CMAS delivery of short fuse, broad-brushed severe weather warnings is growing and increasing the over-warning of the public every day, as older cell phones are upgraded to new WEA-enabled phones. Too often, the user is “surprised” as they are unaware that their phone is equipped to receive a government-issued SMS text warning with a loud tone alert. If the actual threat is many miles away, the user's only choice to not be “surprised” again is to turn OFF the catch-all “Imminent Threat” option.

The proliferation of both free and fee-based notification methods has set the stage for a strong argument for the necessity of notification standards with the objective of minimizing public confusion and building much needed trust in weather warnings. Motivate the public to take immediate protective actions by delivering a timely, site-specific warning, rather then have them engage in seeking secondary verification information which has unfortunately cost many people their lives. NWS warning creation process has improved dramatically in area of rapidly identifying specific areas which are truly at risk. Unfortunately, the downstream processes to deliver this highly accurate information to the general public are completely lacking in consistent, rigid, measurable, and enforceable performance criteria. The NWS mission to save lives and property while developing public confidence in the NWS warning process remains compromised by this situation and will continue to do so as long as any entity with access to this critical public domain information can develop consumable products and services any way they believe will sell, often cutting corners in their processes to preserve profitability.

For decades, the public has primarily placed their trust on what their local broadcast meteorologist is telling them about the immediate danger. When that trusted authority is NOT on the air when danger is imminent, alternative dissemination sources become the difference between someone making a sound or possibly deadly decision. Developing measurable and enforceable standards for these evolving electronic methods of severe weather warning dissemination is of vital importance as the demand for accurate, trustworthy information continues to grow.