Smartphone Thunderstorm Alerts Launched by NWS

Starting August 2021, the National Weather Service (NWS) expanded its warning-alert technology to encompass severe thunderstorm alerts, in addition to its existing alerts for tornadoes and flash floods.  This is great news from an emergency preparedness perspective, because the more informed customers are, the more empathetic they will be toward outage restoration efforts.

Details of the New Severe Thunderstorm Alerts

The great part about this technology is that it’s designed to be triggered only by the more destructive storms, which means that residents won’t get bombarded with alerts for relatively common events.  The new thunderstorm alerts will have specific language depending on which tier the storm falls into:

• “Considerable” storms: These storms have the potential to produce golf-ball-sized hail and/or winds exceeding 70 MPH.
• “Destructive” storms: These storms have the potential to produce baseball-sized hail and/or winds exceeding 80 MPH. Many derechos would fall into this category, including the 2020 derecho that devastated the Midwest (mainly eastern Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana).

Destructive storms like the 2020 derecho will now activate the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system in the local area, allowing residents to differentiate between ‘bad’ and ‘potentially catastrophic’ storms.

The use of these tiers is actually part of a wider, multi-year initiative around “impact-based alerts” designed to help the public understand the urgency of specific weather events.  In fact, impact-based warnings have been in place for flash floods, snow squalls and tornadoes for several years.  NWS initially began pursuing impact-based alerts about 10 years ago after a review of the massive tornado that hit Joplin, MO in 2011 and resulted in 162 fatalities.

In the final analysis, the more the public is informed, the easier our lives can be when it comes to outage restoration.  An informed public would presumably have a greater understanding of the difficulty level of a large-scale restoration, increasing the odds of them giving us the benefit of the doubt.  Thank you, NWS, for launching these new thunderstorm alerts!