Winter Weather Simplification - Open Letter to NWS

To: ELLIOTT.JACKS@NOAA.GOV

Sirs,

I am writing in regards the Proposed Winter Weather Simplification changes. I do not want to see the NWS adopt these changes. The NWS has spent a great deal of time and money to implement VTEC. Vendors and users have also gone to a great deal of effort to use VTEC. This change will put us back where we were before VTEC was implemented.

VTEC has allowed users of NWS products to provide automatic notifications based on the type of weather coded in the VTEC line. This change would make the Winter Storm product generic again for some weather types. If this change is approved we would have a generic “winter weather” coding, with the details in the text. Decoding the text is a problem that was fixed with VTEC. We again will be stuck with the difficult task of trying to determine what kind of “winter weather” is associated with the product.

Many of us have welcomed VTEC because it provides a reliable standardized way to represent the actual weather conditions being issued. Moving from specific weather phenomena to generic phenomena is taking a step backwards.

I respectfully request that this change not be implemented.

Best Regards,

Danny Lloyd
Weather Message

Weather Message 3.3 Beta 6

I have posted Weather Message 3.3 Beta 6. This release contains several bug fixes and some enhancements to the WxPort program.

I am looking at releasing version 3.3 due to several bug fixes in the program. I will evaluate it over the next week and decide a release date.

Note: Beta 6 changes the image communication data stream to the Message Client. Clients will have to be updated to Beta 6 in order to continue to receive images.

Weather Brains

Weather Message will have an advertisement on the Weather Brains webcast. The advertisement will run from February 4th through March 10th. Weather Message will be mentioned at the beginning and end of the webcast. Vist the Weather Brains webpage at http://www.weatherbrains.com/

I have been friends with some of the Weather Brains guys for years because of our interest in amateur radio: James Spann, WO4W; Brian Peters, WD4EPR; and David Black KB4KCH. When I started writing weather related software, they encouraged my endeavor.

If you are interested in weather, you might want to check out their weekly webcast. I am sure you will find their discussions interesting.