Should weather advisories go away?

MANKATO, Minn. (KEYC) - The National Weather Service and KEYC News Now strive to support a “Weather-Ready Nation” by ensuring you are aware and ready for a variety of weather that sweeps across our country every day.

The current way of informing of potentially hazardous weather is through the watch, warning, and advisory system. This current method works great but is still confusing. The least understood alert term being advisory and is why the National Weather Service is asking the question: should advisories go away?

I sat down with Meteorologist Melissa Dye of National Weather Service in Chanhassen to explain what’s going to happen to advisories.

“What the proposed changes would be is to get rid of the advisory products, instead use plain language statements to communicate the risk instead. We want to focus on the watch, being the prepare stage, and the warning being the take action stage. So just trying to eliminate some of that confusion with multiple products”.

These plain language statements would continue to focus on the what, where, when, and impacts while also providing precautionary and preparedness actions. The other thing that would go away if advisories are dropped is the color schemes that are associated with them, which will also reduce in some confusion.

As to when the changes may come about, well that’s still up in the air. “We just had a public survey that closed on the 21st of this month where we were looking for more feedback, just to figure out if we are doing this the best way possible and making sure we are communicating a clear message”.

For more information regarding the possible changes visit https://www.weather.gov/hazardsimplification/revampprogress.

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