Geo-targeting Performance of Wireless Emergency Alerts in Imminent Threat Scenarios: Volume 1 - Tornado Warnings

This study shows that over alerting rates can be reduced if the geo-targeting capabilities of Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) are used effectively. A significant long-standing challenge for imminent threat alert originators (AOs) at all levels of government is how to quickly communicate warning messages to people in danger, while avoiding to warn those not at risk.

If over-alerting occurs, people's lives can be disrupted; they may decide the warnings they receive are not accurate and may ignore later warnings that actually apply to them. Warning fatigue has occurred in highly destructive and deadly tornadoes. People ignored warnings delivered by sirens because the sirens had sounded so many times on past occasions when no tornado appeared. The sirens have also been sounded over too large of an area in past tornadoes (over county-wide areas), and included areas where the public was not threatened.

The report discusses and concludes that one possible solution is to send tornado warnings as accurately geo-targeted Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs).