Wright County Government: National Weather Service To Update Warning System

Press release from the Wright County Government:

July 22, 2021

The National Weather Service announced today that starting Wednesday, July 28 it will be better conveying the severity and potential impacts from significant thunderstorms by adding damage threats to Severe Thunderstorm Warnings – similar to its Tornado and Flash Flood Warnings – on people’s smartphones.

Those familiar with these warnings, which make a sustained loud alert on a phone (similar in many ways to when phones are made aware of an Amber Alert), the new service will be more specific about the nature of the storm. There will be three categories of notifications – “destructive,” “considerable” and “base.”

A destructive storm is identified by hail of 2.75 inches (baseball-sized) in diameter and/or 80 mile per hour winds. A considerable storm has hail of 1.75 inches (golf ball-sized) in diameter and/or 70 mile per hour winds. A base storm has hail of 1 inch (quarter-sized) in diameter and/or winds of 58 miles per hour or more.

On average, only 10 percent of all storms reach the destructive category.

To learn more about this new advanced warning service, click here: https://www.weather.gov/news/072221-svr-wea

This press release was produced by the Wright County Government. The views expressed here are the author’s own.