WAVE 3 meteorologist Tawana Andrew explains why the National Weather Service is changing how they will tell you the winter forecast in the latest Science Behind The Forecast.
Bill Burton: It's time for us to take a look at the Science Behind the Forecast as I am joined by WAVE 3 meteorologist Tawana Andrew. Good morning, Tawana.
Tawana Andrew: Good morning. We're heading into the cold weather season, and some of the alerts that we get from the National Weather Service about that cold weather starting to change.
BB: Right now, the weather is pretty good, but like you said, that cold weather is coming. One thing we won't be hearing about, though, is the wind chill. What do we need to know about this?
TA: So what the National Weather Service is doing right now, they have what's called a hazard simplification, excuse me, initiative, and this began back on Oct. 1. They made some changes, because they're trying to make sure that everyone from meteorologists to the general public can understand what's going on in terms of weather.
So they got some feedback from meteorologists, emergency managers, the general public, and they're working to make sure that they simplify the communication of weather information. So for us now, wind chill watches, warnings and advisories, those will no longer be issued. You would no longer hear me talking about those, those wind chill watches, warnings and advisories have been combined into extreme cold watches, extreme cold warnings and cold weather advisories. So basically, the point of this change is to emphasize that cold is cold — regardless of the wind — and the wind chill is still going to be a factor in the forecast. That's not magically going anywhere. We're still going to be talking about the wind chill, but the overall danger of cold is now going to be the focus with the extreme cold watches, warnings and then those cold weather advisories. On the agriculture side of things, we have typically freeze and hard freeze watches and warnings.
Those are now going to be simplified into just freeze watches and warnings, and the focus is to make sure that anyone in agriculture knows what's going on in terms of potential impacts and preparedness throughout the growing season. So once that growing season ends for a particular area, that means that they will no longer issue those for the rest of the year. So for us, we get freeze watches once the temperature drops below 32 degrees. For frost advisories, those are going to be just the same as what we've always had. They will be continued to be issued when there's widespread frost in the forecast and temperatures drop below 35 so those are going to stay the same. And it's not, it's not the first time they've done something like this. Back in 2017 blizzard and lake effect snow watches were consolidated into winter storm watches. Lake effect snow advisories and freezing rain advisories were integrated into winter weather advisories.
So they have been working to make things easier for everyone to understand. And back in 2017 too, they reformatted their winter weather alerts so the what, the where and the when of potentially impactful winter weather was a little bit more highlighted and easier to understand. And eventually, down the road, they're looking to get rid of advisories too, because they found that it's a little bit harder for a lot of people to understand. And as a meteorologist, I'll say it's a little bit harder to explain, compared to a watch and a warning. So that's going to be the next step in simplifying what we're putting out there in terms of alerts from the National Weather Service in general.
