The IEM attempts to curate a high fidelity archive of National Weather Service Watch, Warnings, and Advisories. While the NWS has been issuing alerts for many decades, the modern era started toward the end of 2005 with the implementation of a more robust system called VTEC. The featured info-graphic is from one of the IEM bean-counting autoplots attempting to estimate the population under a given alert type along with the states and counties/forecast zones counts. The on-going major winter storm over the southern US and now into the northeastern US prompted the NWS to cover a considerable portion of the country under a Winter Storm Warning. The featured graphic is valid 6 AM on Sunday and indicates over 143 million folks under such an alert while covering 1,370 counties or forecast zones. The unofficial IEM database indicates that both values are record highs since at least late 2005. Unfortunately, a simple tool on this website does not yet exist to list these records explicitly, so a manual database query indicates that the next highest totals were significantly lower at just under 100 million people on 1 Feb 2011 and 998 counties/zones on 15 Feb 2021.

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