Severe Thunderstorm - Wind Speed and Hail Size

The next beta release of Weather Message will support decoding the Wind Speed and Hail Size line in Severe Thunderstorm and Severe Weather Statements.  Forecast offices in the Central Region will start testing the "WIND...HAIL" line in SVR and SVS messages on March 1, 2010.

Only SVR and SVS products issued by Central Region forecast offices will contain the "WIND...HAIL" line.  If your forecast office is in the Central Region, you can use this option.  For other forecast offices, using this option will cause your alarm to not work.

Wind Speed will range from 60 miles-per-hour to 100 miles per hour.  Hail Size will range from .75 inches to 4.00 inches.  The alarm option will check for a match or greater speed.  (We could add variables for short messages if needed.)

This is a great addition.  I hope it will be implemented by all NWS forecast offices in 2011.

Note:  For everyone else, if you need this capability, you can use a regular expression to match wind speed embedded in the text.