Alabama 811 | Know What's Below.

Warnings Count

| December 19, 2014 @ 4:11 pm

Here’s something a little different. Daryl Herzmann, with the Iowa Mesonet, has created a page where you can plot the total number of tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings for a particular WFO (Weather Forecast Office), or for all WFOs in the continental US. I think we all know that the amount of severe weather this year is down, way down – and I count that as a blessing. So how does the warning count look? Well take a gander at the graph below which shows that the warning count, both tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings, was down similar to 2013.

This is indicative of two things. First, and the most important, WFO Birmingham has made a very serious effort to reduce the false alarms (FAR or False Alarm Ratio) by undertaking more local studies, putting more meteorological reasoning into warning decisions, and not being too quick to issue a warning for storms. It’s important that everyone understand that by doing this, the meteorologists at the NWS risk missing a few events, but most likely the ones they might miss, whether severe thunderstorm or tornado, will probably be on the low end of intensity. But I believe that is a risk that should be taken in order to reduce the number of warnings that are issued where no significant severe weather occurs. And I applaud this genuine effort to keep people safe but not cry wolf too much.

Second, it also shows that the occurrences of severe weather has been down. I, for one, am thankful for that.

-Brian-

Warning Count for WFO Birmingham, AL

Warning Count for WFO Birmingham, AL

Category: Alabama's Weather, Severe Weather

About the Author ()

Brian Peters is one of the television meteorologists at ABC3340 in Birmingham and a retired NWS Warning Coordination Meteorologist. He handles the weekend Weather Xtreme Videos and forecast discussion and is the Webmaster for the popular WeatherBrains podcast.

Comments are closed.