Unknowns Remain About How Alerts to Cellphones Will Work, NWS Official Says
The National Weather Service will start pushing out emergency alerts to cellphones “sometime in late May,” using the new Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS), NWS Lead for Emerging Dissemination Technologies Michael Gerber said. Gerber said some questions remain as carriers begin to transmit the alerts, a step required by the Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act, which was enacted in 2006. He spoke on a Federal Emergency Management Agency webcast Wednesday on FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System.
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"At the minimum, you'll be seeing an announcement from us by the end of May regarding the exact date of our rollout,” Gerber said. “We're still doing some testing right now. … We're pushing our messages to the server at FEMA IPAWS and validating that we're getting the correct responses back.” The NWS will be broadcasting alerts as “imminent threats” under the CMAS, he said.
Messages of up to 90 characters sent by the NWS will all be in the form of a “notification, it’s a bell ringer,” Gerber said. Recipients will be instructed to turn on their weather radios, go to the Internet or elsewhere seek other information, Gerber said. All weather alerts won’t be transmitted, he said. For example, tornado, tsunami and dust storms warning will be transmitted, but not severe thunderstorms. The NWS wants to avoid “over alerting,” Gerber said.
All the major carriers are already offering Android phones capable of receiving CMAS alerts, Gerber said. The iPhone will also be capable with a software upgrade. Gerber cited a website, www.CTIA.org/wea, as providing basic information on what the various carriers are offering on CMAS. Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless so far are unique in that they will allow subscribers to opt out of all imminent threat alerts except for those categorized as “severe or imminent,” Gerber said. “I'm not sure that the customer is really going to understand what that means,” he said. “We'll see how that goes.” Other carriers allow subscribers to opt out of receiving all imminent threat alerts and AMBER alert warnings, but not presidential level alerts, he said.
Another issue to be worked through is narrowing who receives alerts, Gerber said. Sprint and AT&T are working on a system for narrowing alerts beyond transmission at the affected-county level, he said. “They are telling us there are many, many cell tower network complexities that could result in under or over warning,” he said: A “tower could be broadcasting east down a highway but not westward down a highway, so everybody who is downstream of the tower gets the message but people west of it don’t. … They tell us there’s a lot more complexities.”
The NWS isn’t certain how many emergency messages it will send out through CMAS on average, Gerber said. “That would vary by, I think, the type of weather that’s going through your area,” he said. “If you get multiple tornadoes in your area it’s possible that you would get multiple messages in a given day. … You're going to go long periods of time when you get no messages.” The agency did some research looking at past year trends in the Baltimore-Washington area and found that if it were to broadcast thunderstorm alerts, there was at least one day in every county when subscribers would have received three to seven alerts, Gerber said. “Our concern was if that were to happen people would opt out.”