Oct. 3, 2018 EAS Presidential Alert test

Sean Donelan sean at donelan.com
Tue Oct 9 22:34:25 UTC 2018


On Tue, 9 Oct 2018, Aaron C. de Bruyn wrote:
> Sure--I totally agree.  But we don't build smoke detectors into our
> cell phones because that's not a very good use case.  And I'm not
> aware of weather alerts being broadcast to cell phones without having
> an app installed, and it's unreliable.  (Although some already have
> AM/FM radios in them...)

Since 2011, WEA has been used for over 30,000 weather alerts including 
tsunami, tornado, extreme wind, hurricane & typhoons.  Unless you turn 
alerts off on your cell phone. iPhone 5 (iOS 6 and later) includes WEA.

https://www.weather.gov/wrn/wea

Weather alerts are the largest catagory of Wireless Emergency Alerts on 
cell  phones. However, WEA is only used for the most severe weather 
alerts.  WEA is built into most smart cell phones, and overcomes the 
congestion issues with text based Apps on cell phones.

And we come full circle.  No single warning system works for everything. 
That's why its important to have multiple warning systems or warning 
communication channels.



Amazon Alexa is ahead of Google Assistant with weather warnings.  Alexa 
won't proactively warn you about tornados. But if you ask "Alexa, What's 
the weather?" Alexa will tell you when there is a tornado warning in your
area at that moment. Google Assistant only tells you the forecast, not 
information about active tornado warnings in your area.

Siri and Cortana are very far behind both Amazon and Google.



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