Severe Weather Preparedness Drill, severe weather statement explainer (English)

An Advanced Process

If you pull up a radar image on your phone, or see one on TV, you are likely only seeing a tiny sliver of the available information on any given storm. A storm that shows up as "red" on a weather app, might be less serious than one that is "yellow", or "purple." National Weather Service meteorologists know how to look at hundreds of different pieces of information to learn how serious a storms impact may be.

For example this graphic shows a thunderstorm "sliced" by multiple radar beams like a knife through a cake. Meteorologists can examine the different layers of this cake to know what will happen on the ground.

You read that right, the radar in severe weather mode will produce 96 new images every 4.5 minutes! Your weather app only produces 1 about every 5 minutes!

More important than the amount of information though is how those images are read and intepreted. Meteorologists know storms follow certain patterns, and different signals and signatures mean different sizes of hail, wind speeds, and tornado potential.

What may appear to be a confusing collection of random colors might look more like this to a meteorologist

What this means is that it's very important to take every NWS warning seriously. Saying "it's only radar indicated" is a recipe for disaster! Think about it, if a tornado is forming in the sky it will only show up on radar, someone has to be the first person to be hit by it! Lets hope they took the "radar only" warning seriously and were in shelter! More commonly, damage is occuring or large hail is falling and it has just not been reported yet. If the neighborhood up the street from you hasn't had time to report the damage, your warning will still be "radar indicated" even though bad weather is definitely happening!

So Remember

Look at the details of the warnings and statements. If you are within the warning area take it seriously! It wasn't randomly generated by a computer, it was created by a highly trained professional that has looked at hundreds of pieces of information and decided this storm is dangerous!

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