Comment on "Tornado Warning Fatigue"

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Welcome, Instapundit Readers!  Please feel free to look around while you are here.
Thanks for the link, Glenn.


Glenn Reynolds over at the ubiquitous Instapundit writes:


We were awakened in the middle of the night last night by a tornado warning for a storm that never even came close to our house, but that hit north Knox County pretty hard. I’m happy to have the weather radio to warn us, but we’re beginning to suffer tornado-warning fatigue.

What Glenn is referring to is that if the weather radio is not programmed correctly, it will go off throughout the night for storms you don't care about in areas where you do not live causing you to be awakened in the middle of the night unnecessarily.

Before you purchase a weather radio, make sure the store will program it for you and have them do it before you leave the store! FIPS and S.A.M.E. codes -- some of the exotic languages of meteorology -- are things you shouldn't have to worry about, let the store do that. If the store says they cannot program the radio, purchase it somewhere else. I've found Radio Shack does the job well.

If you already have a weather radio, take it back where you purchased it and have them program it for your specific location.

Otherwise, you'll be like so many others that get tired of losing sleep and will unplug it or throw it away and that is dangerous when the "real thing" occurs. 

Here is a story about the storms.

Addition to the above posting: Glenn says he has his radio set for all but the highest level but there have been too many tornado warnings this year.

I'm currently in Oklahoma City attending the American Meteorological Society's first-ever conference entirely devoted to storm warning techniques. This has been the worst tornado season since 1952 in terms of deaths with well above normal numbers of violent tornadoes. That is, more than anything, what accounts for so many warnings this year. There has been a huge number of storms.

All of us are hoping things get back to normal soon.

Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 24, 2011 at 3:06 PM

    Let me add that you should make sure you get a weather radio that you can program to select only certain counties. Many radios let you block types of warnings (i.e tornado watch, flood watch etc.) but they don't let you set them for only your county. So you get warned for every county that your weather station serves! (that could be hundreds of miles away) The radio you have in the picture (Midland WR-300) is a great radio that lets you select only the counties you want to be warned on.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJune 24, 2011 at 4:07 PM

    I have a cheapie model. When the alarm goes off and the notification is irrelevant to us I just flip the switch one time and it resets.

    ReplyDelete

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