Honor, Michigan

... Maximum wind-hail size tag to be appended to severe
thunderstorm warnings...

Beginning March 1 2010... all NWS central region weather
forecast offices will be appending a tag line to severe
thunderstorm warnings /svr/... and follow-up severe weather
statements /svs/. For the Great Lakes... this tag line will
also be appended to special marine warnings /smw/.

The tag line is a concise code which identifies maximum hail
size and wind speed expected for a given warning. Inclusion
of this information at the end of these products represents
an effort to respond to partner requests from the emergency
management community as well as several societal impact groups.

For instance... one specific application concerns the activation
of emergency alert sirens. Local area sirens are typically
alarmed for tornadoes only. Decoding this tag line will
facilitate the capability for local area emergency managers
to activate sirens for particularly dangerous severe thundertstorm
events when conditions exceed user defined thresholds... say
for winds greater than 90 mph as an example.

The maximum wind-hail size tag line is an Experiment which will
be evaluated from March 1 2010 through October 1 2010. During
this period... we encourage comments or suggestions for improvement
using the electronic survey provided at the link below. Your
feedback will help US determine product usefulness... whether
modifications are needed... and whether this will become a
permanent addition to our warning format.

On-line customer feedback survey /use lower case/:
http://www.Weather.Gov/survey/NWS-survey.Php?Code=svr-wind-hail

A service description document for this Experiment is available
on-line at :

Http://products.Weather.Gov

A map showing affected offices is on-line at:
http://www.Weather.Gov/os/notification/resources/cr_wfos.Pdf

Additional questions or comments may be directed to:
Kim.Runk@noaa.Gov
or
jim.Keeney@noaa.Gov


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