Watches, warnings and advisories

With the "interesting" weather we've had over the past few days, I thought I'd take a moment to give you the inside scoop on watches, warnings, advisories, what they mean, and who does what.

Let's start with watches, when they're issued, it means the condition is POSSIBLE within and close to the watch area. They're issued by the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

If the conditions develop, a Warning is issued, meaning that the severe thunderstorm, tornado, or whatever is imminent or occurring. They're issued by the local National Weather Service Forecast Office. In our case, it's the one in Pueblo, though warnings for Elbert and Lincoln county are issued by the Denver/Boulder office, and for Cheyenne and Kit Carson counties, it's the NWSFO (an abbreviation of the above title) in Goodland, Kansas.

Advisories are for conditions not quite as life and property threatening as a warning, but weather conditions that are intense enough to impact your life. They also come from the local NWSFO. Occasionally, if we get public reports about storm conditions in a given area and nothing has been issued for it, we'll break into programming to let you know.

Interesting to note that there are no "official" watches, warnings or advisories for lightning or heavy rain, though if the rain is heavy enough and persists long enough to cause local flooding, there ARE advisories and warnings for that.

That last note was prompted by a storm that moved across Canon City on the night of July 31st, with (from local reports), LOTS of lightning, and the caller was stunned there was no warning or advisory for it....and the reason is that there IS no official category for that particular weather phenomenon.