Severe Weather outbreaks

Sorry for doublepost, but I saw that Brad was getting dragged amongst the "WX community" for this take, when honestly I wholeheartedly fucking agree with him: https://x.com/BradArnoldWX/status/2050409980507963823
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He's right, the WX nerds always go on about "better safe than sorry!!!" but I've heard from an awful lot of people lately [Joe Sixpack type people, not individuals who are 'keyed in' with weather events or people who pay much attention to NWS besides seeing the weather report on TV] that they're getting sick and tired of being bombarded with warnings and then all it does is rain for 15 minutes and the sky gets dark for a bit. When every thunderstorm is a "severe" thunderstorm, then none of them are and the label/warning means nothing. That's not even getting into something like 70-80% of radar-indicated tornado warnings being false alarms. Eventually people are going to stop paying attention altogether or just turn that shit off entirely and go about their day, and I wouldn't really blame them. And I don't know what's going on with NWS/NOAA but they are whiffing a hell of a lot of SPC convective outlooks lately. MDT risk days without a single tornado warning, just totally busted outlooks, getting everyone all spooked and upset over nothing.

The EAS system is shit for similar reasons, in that it's over-used. When I was younger, that thing only went off and started blaring across the TV speakers if some serious shit was about to go down. Now, every ten minutes on storm days, it's blowing out your speakers for 60mph wind gusts or nickel-sized hail, most of the time the actual alert sounds like shit, and the funniest part: if you were actually watching the weather at that moment, it mutes whatever is on TV so that all you can hear is the warning message, so you're actually getting LESS information thanks to the EAS system. And that's when it isn't being misused for AMBER Alerts that wind up being a fucking child custody dispute at 3AM and nobody was ever in any actual danger. Those mobile-based AMBER Alerts were one of the first things I turned off when I got the option to, they are most usually irrelevant - what am I supposed to do, jump in the car at 3AM and go look for a black kid who went missing eight counties away? And most often it's just "it was his dad's weekend to have him and he didn't drop him off at 6PM as agreed upon, time to wake up and mobilize half of the state!" bullshit custody disputes.

Point being, people [the public] are definitely losing faith in these systems and authorities as a result of this shit and it's likely to result in a body count one of these days when people turn off alerts or see a tornado warning and go: "tornado warning? to hell with it, last twenty of 'em nothing happened, didn't even hear thunder!" when there's an EF-4 trucking toward them.
 
Yeah, I can kind of agree with the over warned aspect. I mean if I’m honest if I see a storm or squall line in my neck of the woods that becomes tornado warned, I simply read the NWS alert and if it ends with “Radar Indicated” I feel that I’m not in as much danger. Just because a mesocyclone is present does not a tornado make.

Of course I’ll type this and next Wednesday my loved ones and I will be blown to kingdom come but the sentiment remains.
 
TrashWhoreRaccoon said:
Would radar holes worsen the over warning-ness? As in, "Oh we can't really see this storm go ahead and put a warning on it just in case."?
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Absolutely. Where I live is smack dab in the middle of one of those coverage “holes”. Local meteorologists have said in the past that the nearest NWS station will frequently warn a storm out of caution rather than definitive data.
 
TrashWhoreRaccoon said:
Would radar holes worsen the over warning-ness? As in, "Oh we can't really see this storm go ahead and put a warning on it just in case."?
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I would bet that it does, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually the cause of it where I live, because this portion of the state is sort of between two major weather radars and the further you get away from the radar unit, the less clarity you have in terms of what is actually going on in the cloud layers, all sorts of things interfere with radar at the lower levels [where tornadoes occur] and this is especially true when you get into radial velocity scanning. Then you'll have those big squall lines/QLCS storms where they'll basically warn the entire line as a small tornado can spin up basically at any time and they're usually short-lived.

There has to be a balance, though, between actually providing relevant information to the public and just throwing warning polygons on half of the state. In my case, I'm mostly complaining about the severe thunderstorm warnings, I don't really mind erroneous tornado warnings that much because they're so localized and oftentimes short-lived, but I'd say roughly 90% of the storms this year so far that have prompted a series of severe T-storm warnings in my area were not worthy of being deemed that. In some cases I'd be under a warning and not even hear fucking thunder at all, for God's sake. And the way warnings are issued also leaves a lot to be desired, for instance flood warnings - they're basically renewed every 3-4 hours for the entire duration of the affected waterway being over flood stage, meaning that for like 4-5 days you're getting totally irrelevant flood warnings when everyone in the area is already well aware.

At this point there's no doubt that most people [who typically don't pay as much attention to the weather as people in this thread would, even opening this thread indicates you have more interest in it than John Q. Public does] are oversaturated with warnings and alerts. It's obvious when you look at social media comments any time a local station has to cut in to programming to cover severe weather, Maude from Frogballs, Arkansas saying "y'all interrupted muh reality shows for a tornado warning and nothin' happened!", the average person doesn't keep track of this stuff, I'd be surprised if most people ever even look at an SPC convective outlook once in their lives, the public doesn't really get how conditional weather is, so in the end bombarding them with alerts like they do now has the opposite effect of what was intended: people stop giving a shit, stop paying attention, or even get aggravated/mad about it.

I don't know what the solution would be, maybe a new alert [that isn't pushed quite as hard as a tornado warning] that is between a watch and a warning? Like a Tornado Advisory? "This storm MAY be producing a tornado" for radar-indicated ones, and use the tornado warning for when one has actually been spotted, or when it's so obvious on radar that it's impossible to ignore. For an example of an obvious radar-confirmed tornado, the 2011 Joplin Missouri tornado:

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That one isn't just the radar "suggesting" there might be a spin-up or rotation occurring, it's the radar screaming: "there's a fucking MASSIVE tornado here right now and the debris being lofted is so large and like 14,000 feet in altitude that the radar thinks that it is giant hail"

The severe thunderstorm warnings, I honestly don't know, maybe the thresholds need to be elevated more because in most cases, the "entry level" threshold for a severe thunderstorm is sustained wind gusts of 58+ MPH or hail that is nickel-sized or larger, but in most cases these aren't occurring throughout the entire cell. 60 MPH wind gusts might take a few shingles or knock your garbage can into the neighbor's yard, but I wouldn't say that it quite demands a warning as it is very unlikely to be life-threatening or cause substantial property damage. They do categorize the threat level, like the 'considerable' or 'destructive' tags, but I'd say maybe the threshold needs to be raised to 70+ MPH wind gusts, because once you get to that point you are very likely to see substantial property damage. That and maybe they should be more selective and not just base the warning on a SINGLE report of a 58+ MPH wind gust. As it stands, I really don't blame people for getting annoyed with it and tired of it.
 
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Green Man said:
He's right, the WX nerds always go on about "better safe than sorry!!!"
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I was in a tornado warning last week that 100% justified even if it never touched down. I got 2 phone notifications, 2 text messages, and an automated call for a single tornado warning. Fuck that shit.
TrashWhoreRaccoon said:
Would radar holes worsen the over warning-ness? As in, "Oh we can't really see this storm go ahead and put a warning on it just in case."?
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Absolutely. NWS Topeka office has on multiple occasions gone, "Fuck it, there's probably a tornado out there somewhere" when their radar in Alma goes down due to storm damage. With KTWX down, the local office is reading tea leaves between the very edge of Wichita's radar and KC's less than ideal doppler.
 
TrashWhoreRaccoon said:
Y'all see that they changed them? I don't think the average joe can really understand them anymore- my friends couldn't even get the older outlooks.
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Yep, they added basically "hatched risks" to just about every outlook which are in theory meant to give an idea of the possible severity [differentiating between, for instance, ping-pong sized possible hail and grapefruit-sized possible hail] but in practice I think it just makes the outlook more 'crowded' looking. Most people use it as a means to determine if there's a chance of significant [intense, EF-2+] tornadoes that day but since they've been whiffing the fuck out of outlooks lately, I haven't really noticed if it's been a worthwhile addition yet.
 
Green Man said:
Yep, they added basically "hatched risks" to just about every outlook which are in theory meant to give an idea of the possible severity [differentiating between, for instance, ping-pong sized possible hail and grapefruit-sized possible hail] but in practice I think it just makes the outlook more 'crowded' looking. Most people use it as a means to determine if there's a chance of significant [intense, EF-2+] tornadoes that day but since they've been whiffing the fuck out of outlooks lately, I haven't really noticed if it's been a worthwhile addition yet.
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Hatched used to MEAN somethin'.
 
You excessively warn storms and people complain, you let up on precautionary warnings and then when storms suddenly flare up people complain about "not enough warning"

There's no winning tbh
 
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