STORM2K

"Hello, this is Jim Cantore of The Weather Channel. A severe weather alert from Notify! has been issued for the city of Scottsdale, Arizona."

Just about every day between 3 and 8 or so, a similar severe weather (or several) alert gets sent to my cell phone and computer. Mind you, it's programmed to accept severe weather info that way. That's not the problem.

About 60% of Arizona's residents (5 million+) live in Maricopa County, a sprawling part of south central Arizona. The county is comprised of more than 9,200 square miles....more than Rhode Island, Delaware, and Connecticut combined...and even bigger than the entire state of New Jersey.

Because weather warnings are issued by county, I can be in the middle of a perfect afternoon...and one that is going to stay that way, and still get that notification. Check out the severe weather map for Arizona just about every evening, and you can see what I mean.

While there may be a storm the size of a football field somewhere in that 9200 square miles, the entire county...millions of us, are part of the warned area.

I don't know the answer to this challenge, but I can tell you that in a county this large, and with so many people, both Jim Cantore and the National Weather Service seem to cry wolf far too many times as a result of the system that is in place.

Indeed, when you see the warning crawl on the screen or get a written message online, it often is more specific...to a location WITHIN the county...but the warning itself is far too broad.

Back in the Midwest, counties were much smaller but even then it was not all that unusual to have a localized storm alarm a whole lot of people unnecessarily.

Time to step up to the technological plate and consider a new and improved warning system that takes into account the real time data that is now available and the various real time ways to disseminate it.

We're under a warning right now. Perhaps an hour or two from now a storm may hold together long enough to reach us...but meanwhile, who is really listening to the message and who is ignoring it altogether.

There has to be a better way...a new facelift on the warning system.

Actually, the NWS does issues warnings based on a latitude/longitude system. If you check out their ridge radar system, you can see the exact coordinates of the warning rather than a full-blanket coverage of an entire county. Unfortunately, most media outlets, to include TWC, focus on the county as a whole rather than the coordinates since that would be really difficult to relay to the public. Therefore they use the blanket system. However, I do agree that the media should display the exact coordinates of the warning on TV and with technology as it is today, this should be worked out for e-mail and cell phone notices based on a blanket zip-code warning rather than a blanket county warning.

it would be easier to centralize the warning systems to a localized portion of the county. I also have notify on my phone and sometimes back home the warning would be for the southern part of the county, totally missing the northeast portion of the county where I'm from... unfortunately, my hometown sits right on a border of 3 counties meaning it is sometimes challenging to get the right warning in the particular county

Senorpepr, I am familiar with the new ridge radar and what I see is a BIG improvement. But the vast vast majority of everyday people don't use the radar and other weather pages online anyway. They rely on mass media to inform them of any impending danger. Frankly, many in mass media don't look out the window NOW before they give a forecast, let alone understand how to get more specific in a useful way with their warnings.

It would be a MAJOR undertaking to tackle the challenge of more site-specific real-time warning criteria for both NWS and the public to understand. I just know that the only real improvement I've seen in warning capabilities via mass media has shown up in the form of a crawl below a television show or a symbol in a corner of the TV screen. And by the time you read it, your house could have blown away.

You and I...and pojo here, for example, know where to look, know what we are looking for, and what it all means to us and our neighbors. Everyone else is at the mercy of the system in place....an old one at that.

I was once given a plaque from the NWS, one that I honor because they were rarely given to individuals outside the organization. It was in recognition for the fact that our home county personally had more weather alert radios per capita than any other county in the country. I sold those things for next to nothing just so people could use the technology. I'd drive to the house and set it up for them. And in the end, NWS did recognize that commitment.

It would take something much bigger than that to educate a country that is used to hearing the 10 pm reporter say...

"Not only is this storm flooding the streets all over town, but the forecast for tomorrow is, you guessed it, more and more rain!"

Like to have a nickel for every time that statement has been abused.

Also has anyone read a given NWS warning text (straight out of the computer)? It sometimes may say "NORTHWESTERN SAUNDERS COUNTY..." for example. But the coding in the counties is set to the WHOLE county. All the FirstWarn-type systems on television stations read the county coding; hence, this is why you see the ENTIRE county filled. Knowing TWC's simplicity ways recently, this is the same way with the Notify! service.

Personally, I'd like to see cell phone companies jump on the weather alert bandwagon. If they could ingest the weather warning feed and use NWS's warnings, based off of the coordinate system rather than blanket counties and compared to the cell phone user's position obtained from the upcoming GPS-cell technology, produce a text message warning straight to the user's cell phone. That would be a wonderful way to get the word out, especially with the number of cell phone users today.

Secondly, for those e-mail warnings and even media warnings where exact coordinate advisories may be very difficult to relay to the public, I'd like to see the use of warnings affected zip-code regions rather than full counties.

For instance, say a tornado warning is issued in Cass County, MO. Under today's standard, the entire county would be warned, affecting over 82,000 people. Using zip-codes, this would break up the county into 11 sections. So, say the tornado warning is only affecting the zip codes of 64746, 64078, and 64734 -- a typical size for a tornado warning. This warning would alert the five small towns with a total population of 8,300 of the real NWS warning -- allowing 73,700 people to not be bothered by something that isn't affecting them and thus reducing the "crying woof" problem.

Our TV Mets and TV crawls do break down the locations within Pima and Cochise Counties (Santa Cruz County is so small that one storm complex can cover it).

Steve

Ironically, I see where Phoenix, Scottsdale and Casa Grande got clobbered tonight.

Steve

As we write...indeed we got the real thing tonight. I will check rainfall in about 30 min. But anticipate well over an inch in 90 minutes!

Of course I'm in the East where counties are really small and most warnings are for multiple counties... But my old technology weather radio tells me there's a problem and I can pay attention to figure out if and how it will affect me.

It's far, far better to get some irrelevant warnings than not to get warnings. I am old enough to remember when there weren't any warnings--the hazardous weather was just "there."

With NOAA weather radios, you know if you are driving into something bad, you know the thunderstorms are headed you way, etc.

If you hear a warning and are not sure whether it is for you or not, usually you can check another source--but if you can't, at least you can keep an eye on the weather or go inside and check on your location if you are not sure where you are (if traveling) and don't know if it affects you or not.

I was driving in with an elderly passenger and my NOAA radio went off (it lives in my purse) and told us that we were in the path of severe storm with dangerous winds--I pulled off the road and got my passenger inside and we then watched as a tree fell across the road where we had been driving minutes before. Without the NOAA radio, I would not have been able to convince my passenger that the weather was severe enough to stop and seek shelter.

In general I've found that people pay attention to NOAA radios. They do give you those few minutes to seek shelter that you need. Kids may argue if you pull them off the beach or the ballfield (especially if they can't yet see the storm) but they will obey a NOAA radio warning.