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Courtesy of WTVM-9 Lee County moves to storm-based siren system
November 9, 2009
By: Chris Vessell AUBURN, AL (WTVM) - Tornado sirens are meant to save lives, but some weather forecasters worry that too many soundings can actually have the opposite outcome. They're calling it the "blue sky" effect. Lee County is one of the first to address the problem. It happens far too often during severe weather season. "The blue sky effect: the warnings are going off you look up, and see blue sky, you're going to really question why the sirens are sounded, and you might not be inclined to take action," John DeBlock, National Weather Service said. On April 10th of this year, tornado sirens went off a total of six times in just two and a half hours. All citizens were warned even if they weren't affected by the storm. "Say we have a polygon that includes Smiths Station and that area of Lee County - normally we would have blown every siren in Lee County for that small area in the county that was actually under the threat." This prompted change in Lee County and now their Emergency Management Agency is the first in the state to begin using what's called a Storm Based Warning System. "We know where our sirens are, the National Weather Service knows where their polygons are, we have merged those two so that we can actually blow the sirens based on that polygon," Kathrine Russell, Director of the Lee County EMA said. The system should keep thousands of Auburn University students from being evacuated when there's no real threat. "I have seen storms that were tracking well south of the university, and towards the east that had no chance of affecting the university. However, the sirens were being activated and people were taking shelter," said Chance Corbett, AU Department of Public Safety. The EMA says their new warning system reduces the total area that's warned by 73 %. The "less is more" philosophy is one meteorologist John DeBlock says could save lives. "Our experience, our technology that we have, we're really focusing in on the area of greatest threat, and those are the folks that we want to take action," DeBlock said. A University of Oklahoma study found that this system could reduce the economic impact of warnings in a typical county by $50 million dollars per year. |
