AccuWeather Blames National Weather Service for False Alarm Tsunami Warning

AccuWeather says it was not responsible for Tuesday morning’s mistaken Tsumani warning push notifications.

The company, which provides commercial weather forecasting services around the world, blamed the National Weather Service in a statement, saying that this is not the first time the NWS has mistakenly used actual warning codes in test alerts that ultimately resulted in real warnings being sent out.

Meanwhile, the NWS is blaming “one private sector company” that it says sent out the routine test message as an official tsunami warning. It did not mention AccuWeather by name.

Barry Meyers, AccuWeather’s CEO, advised the NWS to change the way it issues test alert three years ago, the company said.

“We understand the reason for test messages, but we feel that NWS consider fail safe measures for the future to prevent such an occurrence. The issuance did say it was a “TSUNAMI WARNING,” but it was not a tsunami warning, rather simply a test of the system,” he wrote. “We note that the method currently used of relying on the “TEST” in the header of the product and a test in the VTEC status, as the identifying device for software coding in numerous programs and systems used by a plethora of companies to identify such messages, has proven to be a less than perfect system.”

AccuWeather said in a statement that it uses “sophisticated algorithms” to scan all of the codes the NWS sends out, and that the mistake happened not because of a computer error on their end, but because the NWS embedded the wrong code in its original message.

Whoever is to blame, one thing is for certain: No Tsunami hit the East coast Tuesday morning, thankfully.