88th Annual Meeting (20-24 January 2008)

Wednesday, 23 January 2008
Improving storm based warnings
Exhibit Hall B (Ernest N. Morial Convention Center)
John T. Ferree, NOAA/NWS, Norman, OK; and H. L. White
Warnings for tornadoes, severe thunderstorms and flash floods are some of the most important products issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS). On October 1, 2007, these warnings transitioned from warnings for entire counties or parishes to smaller “storm-based” warnings where the area under warning is defined by a set of latitude and longitude points.

In the coming years, this transition is expected to reduce the area covered by these warnings by as much as 70 percent. Emergency management and other disaster response agencies can focus their limited resources on smaller areas. Citizens will be under warning less with the expected result of greater public confidence in the warnings.

During the next two year period, storm-based warnings are expected to evolve in several key areas, including:

• A collaborative process that allows an office to issue a warning that extends into a bordering office's area of responsibility (County Warning Area – CWA),

• Cross-referencing of other valid warnings when multiple warnings exist for the same county or parish,

• Improving the accuracy of real-time local storm reports,

• Dissemination in more machine readable format such as CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) or XML (Extensible Markup Language), and

• Improving the description and accuracy of the location and movement of the threat.

Over a longer term, the NWS is investigating expanding this concept into other areas such as winter storms and heat. Given our warnings aren't always storm related, we may ultimately wish to refer to these as “Impact-based warnings”. For example, we could issue “Impact-based” heat warnings to account for known local sea breezes, or we could finely delineate areas within counties where precipitation types vary in a winter storm.

NOAA's NWS is committed to continue to collaborate closely with academia (both in weather and social sciences), broadcast meteorologist, and private sector companies involved in the dissemination of warnings. This collaboration will help ensure that storm-based warnings and/or “Impact-based” warnings are both effective and properly utilized, resulting in successful protection of life and property.

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