New Thunderstorm Warnings To Be Issued By National Weather Service

The term “severe thunderstorm” will be more specific and perhaps easier to understand.

Starting August 2nd, the National Weather Service will better convey the severity and potential impacts from thunderstorm winds and hail, by adding a “damage threat” tag to Severe Thunderstorm Warnings, similar to Tornado and Flash Flood Warnings.

A Severe Thunderstorm warning with a destructive damage threat, means there is hail at least 2.75 inches in diameter (baseball-sized), and/or at least 80 mile an hour winds.

Those in the warned area will automatically receive a Wireless Emergency Alert on their smartphones.

A Severe Thunderstorm warning with a considerable damage threat, means there is hail at least 1.75 inches in diameter (golf ball sized), and/or 70 miles per hour winds.

A baseline severe thunderstorm warning means there is hail at least 1 inch in diameter, and/or 58 mile per hour winds.

There will not be a Wireless Emergency Alert issued for considerable damage threats and in baseline warnings.

Meteorologist Nickolai Reimer from the National Weather Service Office in Billings, Montana says the change should simplify things both in terms of interpreting the severity of a thunderstorm warning, and spreading the word.

“We’re just trying to keep things a little bit more simple and also put it just in a consistent way so that media partners and others can easily pick up on that, so that it’s a little bit easier to spread that message instead of having to look through the whole thing, see what the size of the hail is and then equate that to the kind of damage that we’re expecting.”

The Weather Service adds on average, about 10% of all severe thunderstorms nationwide each year reach the destructive category.