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