A new text message warning system gives motorists up to 10 minutes' notice of a potentially damaging hail storm for their area. Picture: PerthNow Source: PerthNow
- Text message warning system warns drivers of storm
- System can measure size of hail stones, where it will hit
- Message gives people minimum five minutes to move car
YOUR mobile phone could save your car from expensive hail damage this summer.
A text message warning system has been developed that gives motorists up to 10 minutes' notice of a potentially damaging hail storm for their area.
The Hail Automated Notification System (HANS) was developed in South East Queensland, but is available across Australia, and received its first test last night in Melbourne delivering up to 70,000 messages minutes before a hail storm lashed the city.
Paul Malt, director of IT for A&G Insurance, says HANS goes further and is more specific than the Bureau of Meteorology warnings.
"BOM issues a warning for a larger area, such as the whole of South East Queensland,'' he said.
"Where we differ is we take the targeting information to another level to track the cell of the storm that contains the ice, to measure the size of the ice and to then work on probabilities of where that storm will specifically track.
"We will be much more targeted to specific locations within a region.''
HANS is available free to Budget Direct customers at their home address. The messages to customers read: "From Budget Direct: There is a high probability of hail for (name of the suburb/district). Please take appropriate precautions and stay safe.''
"At this point it uses the home address of the customer, but where we see it going is to potentially offer the customer the ability to nominate other addresses such as where they work,'' he says.
"As people get more used to location-aware systems, our ultimate goal - if people are comfortable - is to link it to their mobile phone location.''
Mr Malt says they have been working on HANS for several years and been trailing it over the past week with storms in South East Queensland and NSW. The first high-volume test was yesterday's Melbourne hail storm.
"We've continued to work hard at getting the right warning time,'' he said.
"We're trying to give people a minimum of five minutes.
"From a safety perspective we don't want people moving their car during a hail storm. So unless we can give a minimum of five minutes warning we won't send out alerts.
"However, we can't be sure how quickly the text message gets through the carrier's network to the handset.
"It's always hard to get a definitive answer on whether our warning was exact, but some of the feedback from our Melbourne customers was that they had the information in time and had been able to act on it and then received hail.''
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