Lake Wind advisories are commonly issued in our area to keep people safe. After doing some research, the National Weather Service is wondering if there could be a better way of communicating the threat. They are proposing the idea of getting rid of advisories, mainly to avoid confusion, and make the warning system less cluttered.
"People don't know what the advisory means. There's watch, warning, and advisory is somewhere in the middle,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Smallcomb.
A watch means threatening weather could happen, all of the ingredients are there. A warning or advisory is issued when the threat is immanent. It’s happening. The difference between a warning and advisory is that an advisory is less threatening. The weather is more of a nuisance than anything else.
If the National Weather Service got rid of advisories, people would only have to focus on two terms instead of three. What they would like to do instead of issuing an advisory is issue some sort of statement highlighting the impacts.
"The whole goal is to simplify things so that when the weather service does issue an alert whether it be a watch or a warning there is a greater likelihood people will pay attention to that,” said Smallcomb.
This could be for winter weather, wind, and other weather patterns such as fog. This would also allow forecasters to focus more on impacts rather than criteria.
For example, getting a couple inches of snow while everyone is in bed sleeping is not as bad as when everyone is going to work or coming home. The goal of getting rid of the word advisory is to make the particular hazard more clear to the general public.
There are currently over twenty different advisories the National Weather Service can issue. This can get messy. Some meteorologists call all the different alerts, the periodic table of watches and warnings. Our local weather office issues a ton of advisories. The Lake Wind advisory is the most common.
"If it is decided to proceed and get rid of the advisory there will be an adjustment period. There's a lot of folks that are used to advisories and actually a lot of agencies that have it in their plans,” said Smallcomb.
This proposal is not set in stone. The National Weather Service would like your feedback. If you want to take their survey, visit the link below:
