Tracking severe weather is the most important job duty we have as being broadcast Meteorologists. It is our job to relay important information from the National Weather Service while providing additional context, details, and our own observations regarding a storm's strength, track, and timing. We do not take this responsibility lightly.
Social media, apps, and text alerts are a great way to get basic daily weather information, but live television and digital streams remain the fastest way to provide and verbalize severe weather updates to the public. Your safety is my number one priority. I ask you as a viewer, to please understand that it is our duty to cover severe weather for all of SE Wisconsin. So, while a storm may not be affecting your specific neighborhood, a dangerous situation may be unfolding in other parts of the area.
With all that said, we hear your feedback when weather coverage overrides your favorite programming, and we sincerely weigh this feedback when establishing our official Storm Team 4 severe weather guidelines. In fact, just in the last year, we've made some adjustments to these guidelines, based on your feedback along with better storm tracking technology.
Here are our current guidelines:
Tornado Watch:
If issued for a good portion of SE Wisconsin, a brief weather cut into programming may be needed to initially alert the public of this threat.
Severe Thunderstorm Warning:
In most cases, this will require breaking into programming as soon as possible. The time length, frequency, and urgency will depend on how many people are affected and the severity of the storm determined by the Meteorologist.
Tornado Warning:
In most cases this will require breaking into programming as soon as possible and staying with "wall to wall" coverage until the tornado warning is canceled, expired, or the Meteorologist believes the imminent Tornado threat is over.
This last guideline is a recent adjustment based on your feedback, which we actually applied last night! There were multiple cases last night where we had a tornado warning. In these cases, we immediately broke into coverage, unfortunately during a highly watched Voice finale. After time passed, we received minimal damage reports, no visual confirmation of a tornado on the ground, and a lack of tornadic radar evidence. I then made the decision to go back to the Voice programming. I do not make this decision lightly. As I stated before, your safety is my number one priority.
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