IEMBOT/NWSCHAT-BASED ALERT SERVICE

[Gary Fritz]

I’d like to share some insight on a service which provides access to NWS warnings the moment they are issued – with this service you will often receive warnings 15 to 30 seconds before they are transmitted over NOAA Weather Radio. The service is IEMBOT which is a set of programs running on the Iowa Mesonet server and is intended to aid in the dissemination and use of NWS warnings by their chat partners. While NWS chatrooms are closed to public access the JavaScript client web interface at https://weather.im/iembot/ is open to the public and updates every 8 seconds providing instant access to warnings. We’ve taken this approach one step further by directly ingesting the IEM JSON service to process the warnings in support of our EMA operations. The result is an Emergency Management Office application which verbally announces “Tornado Warning” or “Severe Thunderstorm Warning” when such warnings are issued for nearby counties as severe weather approaches. When a tornado warning is issued for Dubois County in Indiana our computers sound off “ATTENTION…..A TORNADO WARNING HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR DUBOIS COUNTY….REPEATING…” and our emergency callout system can be engaged before the public receives the warning via NWR. Here are links to some of the audio alerts issued by our system: Tornado Warning Severe Thunderstorm Warning

 

[Ben Holcomb]

Great resource while chasing. I have access to the NWSChat version, but would highly recommend leaving this up. It's easy to glance over and see what is going on, and you can see reports as they come in, etc. NWSChat is a little better, but it's mostly up for NWSBot. The only thing that sucks is it takes a good 5-10 minutes sometimes for SPC outlooks to post after they show up, so you can click the link and get a 404 error at first.