The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration National Weather Service (NWS) has been on a journey to improve our hazard communications and make more effective our emergency messaging across the 11 National Service Programs: Severe, Aviation, Fire, Marine, Public, Space, Tropical and Winter Weather as well as Water Management/Hydrology, Climate, and Tsunamis. The challenge for effective messaging is to ensure that the public takes the appropriate pre-cautions and actions for the type of subjected hazards in time and space until the hazard has dissipated.
The 11 Service Programs have been rallying around Hazard Simplification and Hazard Services. In addition to reformatting our Watch Warning Advisory (WWA) products to Impact Based Warnings (IBW) and minimizing technical jargon in our product text, the vision is also to leverage CAP to better communicate urgency, severity, and certainty information.
NWS CAP messages are in XML format and based on NWS weather and hydrologic watches ,warnings, advisories, and special statements. NWS CAP messages are designed to be Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) compliant. Learning more about Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) and more effective messaging is an important step for us newbies.