ThreatWatcher—Now monitoring tornado activity

While we most often associate American tornadoes with the Midwest and South, they can—and do—occur outside of these hotspots. In fact, dozens of tornadoes have touched down in Massachusetts since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began tracking them in 1950, including several in the F4 and F5 categories (the two highest on the scale). With global warming making weather more unpredictable than ever, a deadly cyclone in Boston is a threat for which every campus must have a plan.  

Alertus ThreatWatcher was implemented at UMass Boston in May 2024, in an effort to further enhance the campus’s emergency preparedness. The product is a weather monitoring service that provides real-time updates regarding severe weather, scanning the information to isolate what is of immediate concern and creating a computer pop-up for campus dispatch. “Before this, dispatch would receive tornado warnings on their cell phones like everyone else. Then would activate the alert system as needed. Now they don’t need to be monitoring cell phone alerts. This is all on the computers in dispatch,” says Director of Emergency and Risk Management Justin Comeau. Once a pop-up arrives, dispatch can get an alert out to campus—with specific instructions and details.  

According to Peter Tierney, Director of IT Application & Support, UMass Boston has ThreatWatcher set up so that dispatch receives only immediate threats—Tornado Warnings, as opposed to Tornado Watches. The software is also set up to focus specifically on the area surrounding campus. “Prior to this, we did not have any warning for tornado events and now we do,” says Tierney. “We don’t want to use it. We hope we never have to use it. But if we do need to use it, it is there and it is a security blanket.”