HOME
View item details
V1.1
Title:
Partial County Warnings for NOAA Weather Radio (NWR) All Hazards and the Emergency Alert System (EAS)
Category:
Operational
Status:
New Entry
Service Area:
Cross
Entered:
2019-10-24
Type:
Product
Data (Obs/Forecast/verification)
Dissemination System
Model
Model Data
Web Page
Data Mining Tool
Outreach / Education
Display App
Service
Other
Scope:
Description
The NWS disseminates weather warnings and Non-Weather Emergency Messages (NWEMs) via NWR and NWR serves as a primary source of information for the nation’s EAS. Using NWR receivers equipped with Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME), users can program their receivers with a six digit location code for their county and receive automated notifications for all WFO warnings disseminated with SAME. Both NWR and EAS are generally viewed as county-based systems. However, as a result of the introduction of polygon-based warnings in 2007, even if only a small part of county is included in a polygon-based warning, the entire county receives the warning via SAME and EAS. This is particularly problematic for very large; uniquely-shaped (e.g., panhandle, rectangular); or uniquelyconfigured (e.g., islands) counties. Both NWR and EAS allow a county to be divided into fixed partitions, with the number of partitions ranging from two through nine. Each partition has a unique, six digit location code. To combat the issue of warning entire county areas when, in fact, only a portion of the county is affected, four WFOs (Duluth, Glasgow, Rapid City and Tuscon) successfully assigned partial county codes to one or more of their counties more than 10 years ago. Until now, this service capability was only provided via NWR and EAS for weather messages. However, partial county alerting will potentially be used for NWEMs, such as Fire Warnings. Additionally, partial county alerting will be properly documented in Common Alerting Protocol version 1.2 (CAP v1.2) messages and in WMO messages to ensure consistency of messages across multiple dissemination platforms.
Tags
Product information and survey access
Point of Contact
Timothy Schott timothy.schott@noaa.gov
Document (e.g. PDD)
SDD_PartialCountyWarningsforNWRandEAS.pdf
Example file:
(OPTIONAL) If you have a sample image, please upload.
Product URL(s):
Comments via:
Comment Start Date:
0000-00-00 Comment End Date: 0000-00-00
Experimental
Notification:
Decision information
Deciding Official:
Andrew Stern
Decision:
Decision Date:
0000-00-00
Decision Document:
Operational
Notification:
ID:826
Last edit date to this meta-data: 2019-10-24