We also know that the weather service issues warnings based on radar signatures and spotter reports, both of which are prone to a high degree of error. From an emergency management's point of view, marginal severe weather cases cause the same response from spotters as the cases where there is a wide-spread danger of damaging winds and large hail. I believe that we can best serve public interest by increasing the lower limits of the severe thunderstorm criteria. The general public tends to ignore severe thunderstorm watches and warnings, at least more so than tornado watches and warnings. Unfortunately this defeats the purposes of issuing such statements.
Severe thunderstorms are capable of producing serious threats to life and property.
Since severe thunderstorms are dangerous but produce a great deal of apathy among the public, one must seriously why such a reaction occurs. Often times media uses the word severe to represent any situation where thunderstorms occur and cause some sort of associated problem. Flash flooding, frequent lightning and even the occurrence of enough rain to disrupt traffic can be used to justify the use of the description severe. This is in part due to the media outlets' ignorance of the actual definition of a severe thunderstorm. Nonetheless, it leads to the improper use of severe to describe those thunderstorms that do not pose a significant threat to the general public.