NWS Looking for Simplification

This week’s major weather story in the US involves the major nor’easter that is effecting much of the Northeast right now. Many of you know, the NWS has to issue various watches, warnings and advisories for the potential hazards that these events may bring. However, for much of the public, the system gets incredibly confusing. According to the Capital Weather Gang, one NWS office in the northeast had 14 watches, advisories and warnings over a small county area.

This make it incredibly hard to understand what hazards they are supposed to retain from these products.

“It’s not hard to imagine how someone visiting weather.gov would be confused by the veritable rainbow of weather alerts that pepper the Northeast this week, and wonder how much and what type of impact he or she would be likely to see.”

The NWS has recently begun to ask social scientists how they should go about improving this system to effectively communicate hazards to the public, and the answer may lie in how Europe does things.

“Meteoalarm, which is a warning system collaboration between 31 European weather agencies, sets the bar high for weather communication simplicity. It uses a four-tier, color-coded scale from green to red to indicate how severe weather conditions are expected to be in each region. It also adds weather symbols to help clarify what type of event will be causing the impact, like rain, snow, or wind.”

At the NWA conference in October, many people from the NWS presented ideas in favor of this system being implemented into the NWS system. The NWS in Louisville will soon be testing a system like this, and the NWS in Gaylord, Michigan already does this. Implementing this, however, will be a long and tough process.

“The current system is deeply ingrained in everything from NOAA’s daily operations to the private sector’s. An entire weather communications infrastructure has been built upon the framework of the current watch, warning, and advisory system. To make any change would be a slow and arduous process that would involve the public and private sector as well as the media.”

Personally, I don’t think that the NWS should get rid of the watch/warning system. I feel like this has been so ingrained within society that changing it now would be incredibly tough to change at this point, and would likely only increase confusion. I think if the NWS was to separate oceanic forecasting from the coastal offices, that would alleviate a ton of confusion. 7 of those 14 watch, warnings and advisories issued by the NWS in Mount Holly were either coastal or oceanic products. Eliminating those from the daily jurisdiction of coastal NWS offices would help to alleviate confusion significantly.

Additionally, I feel as if the NWS could easily combine products to ease communication issues. There are too many flood products, too many winter weather products, etc. The NWS could eliminate significant confusion by using one “Winter Storm Warning/Watch” and giving the precip type stuff within that, and do the same for the “Winter Weather Advisory”. Cut out the ice storm warning, freezing rain advisory, etc. They could compact the flood products into just simple watches and warnings, and they’d be set!

I also believe that investing more in public education of how to interpret this information will help significantly improve communication between the public and the NWS. Signs of the NWS trying to better information dispersion among the public came back in October when the SPC redid their convective outlooks.

For more information on this, check out the full Capitol Weather Gang article here.