Warnings on Tropical Cyclone for WMO Global Multi-Hazard Alert System

Abstract

ABSTRACT The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is planning to implement a Global Multi-hazard Alert System (GMAS) to aggregate official warning 1 information issued by authorities around the world and to serve as a one-stop shop to support the humanitarian organizations of the United Nations (UN), National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) and other global users including the media. It aims to enhance the authority and visibility of NMHSs and other alerting authorities. To aid effective dissemination of warnings to GMAS, the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) was considered as a standard and robust format to use. In respect of GMAS infrastructure, the World Weather Information (WWIS) and the Severe Weather Information Centre (SWIC) of WMO as well as the WMO Alert Hub now being implemented are identified as core components, among others. The SWIC is being upgraded with GIS capability for displaying authoritative warnings and tropical cyclone (TC) information, and for use as a display platform of GMAS. Apart from warnings from NMHSs, authoritative TC warnings and advisories issued by Regional Specialized Meteorological Centres (RSMCs) and Tropical Cyclone Warning Centres (TCWCs) are also indispensable information for GMAS. As the existing TC warnings and advisories, now more or less in free text format, are mainly targeted for human users and are not intended for automatic parsing by computer software, it is proposed to make available the TC advisories in a machine-readable format so that TC information can be effectively ingested into GMAS and made available to the UN humanitarian organizations, NMHSs and other global users. In this respect, some enhancement measures to TC advisories are proposed. This calls for active collaboration of Members of the Typhoon Committee in the GMAS project.