iNWS Alert Service

The National Weather Service is now offering a new alert service for end users. I was somewhat excited when I found out about the product and wanted to see how the service perform before I posted a review.

It should be noted the product is in the process of evolving and they are improving/changing it as they get more feedback. It has changed since I subscribed initially back in February.

While there are several things offered with the iNWS service, I will focus specifically on the alert service. I think receiving alerts is an important safety factor for everyone when it comes to severe weather.

To use the service, one needs to register and complete their profile. When I signed up, one could set up SMS text alerts to their cell phones. It has temporarily been been disabled and now only email alerts can be sent. That should still allow most mobile users to use the service since most cell phones can receive email.

One thing that intrigued me about the iNWS service was the ability to select a custom alert area. You can select a county or a location by zip code but you can draw a custom alert area. What I like about that you can draw out an area on a map. I have a pretty good idea on what path storms take when hitting Howard County (my primary area of interest).

I had my account set for several months awating for some severe weather to see how the alert service compared against a subscritpion service I have been using for around two years. (I love alerts to my cell phone.) The service I use is from Storm Now.

As mentioned be, new subscribers cannot subscribe to SMS alerts but that is what I received to my cell phone. I also received regular email alerts to my primary personal email from the iNWS service. Both looked nearly identical in format and layout.

Comparing the alerts from Storm Now to iNWS in format is simple. Here is the iNWS alert

New event. Severe Thunderstorm Warning from 05/15/09 08:17 PM EDT to 05/15/09 09:00 PM EDT for Primary Coverage. http://bit.ly/lSe2p

That is not very descriptive. The Storm Now alert is the actual NWS text. To get that you need to click the link in the alert from the iNWS. Clicking the link provides the following...



The visual is nice and on the computer web page, it works rather nice but on my cell phone (Blackberry Pearl) the visuals didn't always load and the text was a bit hard to read. The entire process of accessing a link for the full text of the alert didn't appeal to me at all. I would much rather do without the visual and always have the text available.

While I mentioned my preference above, that was not the real problem. It was all about timing. It is very important to get severe weather alerts in a very timely manor. The iNWS service was slow. In fact I would say dangerously slow.

My alert area is rather large and I usually want to know what is happening two counties at a minimum to the west/southwest of my primary county. If my area was much smaller, then I might not have a heads up and be paying attention to other notifications including broadcast media.

On the above alert issued by the NWS at 8:17 PM, I received the email alert from Storm Now at 8:18 PM which can be considered instantly. (The process involves the alert being sent to a dedicated email account at gmail for my BlackBerry and having the BlackBerry service retriving the message and delivering it to my phone.)

Saddly the email from iNWS directly came in at 8:24 PM on my primary email account and the direct SMS delivery to my phone was at 8:25 PM. That delay is an eternity of time when it comes to personal safety.

Clearly the iNWS service is not up to the task as of today if you want/need instant alerts.

It should also be noted the Storm Now service offers not just alerts but the full compliment of NWS products and can be quickly and easily be customized as your needs change. (For example, I sometimes like the SPC outlooks when they are talking about severe weather in Indiana but don't need them on cell phone when they are just for the plain states or on days when there isn't much going on.)

Storm Now can also allow you to set up custom delivery profiles. For example, I do now want woken up with an Winter Storm Watch at 3 AM but would like it anytime between 7 AM to 10 PM. However I want Thundstorm and Tornado Warnings any time when they happen.

While not free, Storm Now offers a great servcie for $2 per month for each email account. If you need alerts in a timely manor, there is nothing better.