Noaa Weather Radio Download
Pirkko Wassell
NOAA Weather Radio provides continuous broadcasts direct from your local office of the National Weather Service. NOAA Weather Radio broadcasts the latest weather information on seven frequencies in the 162.40 to 162.55 MHz range and can be received up to 40 miles from the transmitter. In the Mobile NWS Office Forecast Area, NOAA Weather Radio transmitters serve a total of 29 counties across southeast Mississippi, southwest Alabama and the northwest Florida panhandle.
Regular broadcasts are tailored to the needs of the people who live within the listening area of the NOAA Weather Radio transmitter. During hazardous weather, regular programming will be interrupted to provide up-to-date information, watches, and warnings. A special tone automatically triggers weather radio receivers with an "alert" feature that can be used to alert you of a dangerous weather situation.
Many NOAA Weather Radios are now equipped with SAME, short for "Specific Area Message Encoder", which allows you to select only the county or counties you want to be alerted for. The SAME alert system allows you to program your receiver for a specific county or for multiple counties. SAME is one of the primary activators of the Emergency Alert System. SAME equipped NOAA Weather Radio Receivers are available to the public at local radio supply stores at a cost typically ranging from $30 to $100. A NOAA Weather Radio is very useful in situations where hazardous weather is expected to impact your area at night since the weather radio will alert and awaken you to the warning. IT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE!
Under a January 1975 White House policy statement, NOAA Weather Radio was designated the sole Government-operated radio system to provide direct warnings into homes for both natural disasters and nuclear attack.
NOAA Weather Radio (NWR), also known as NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards, is an automated 24-hour network of VHF FM weather radio stations in the United States that broadcast weather information directly from a nearby National Weather Service office. The routine programming cycle includes local or regional weather forecasts, synopsis, climate summaries or zone/lake/coastal waters forecasts (when applicable). During severe conditions the cycle is shortened into: hazardous weather outlooks, short-term forecasts, special weather statements or tropical weather summaries (the first two are not normally broadcast in most offices). It occasionally broadcasts other non-weather related events such as national security statements, natural disaster information, environmental and public safety statements (such as an AMBER Alert), civil emergencies, fires, evacuation orders, and other hazards sourced from the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) Emergency Alert System. NOAA Weather Radio uses automated broadcast technology (since 2016: Broadcast Message Handler) that allows for the recycling of segments featured in one broadcast cycle into another and more regular updating of segments to each of the transmitters. It also speeds up the warning transmitting process.
The U.S. Weather Bureau first began broadcasting marine weather information in Chicago and New York City on two VHF radio stations in 1960 as an experiment.[1][2] Proving to be successful, the broadcasts expanded to serve the general public in coastal regions in the 1960s and early 1970s.[3] By early 1970, ESSA listed 20 U.S. cities using 162.55 MHz and one using 163.275 "ESSA VHF Radio Weather."[4] Later, the U.S. Weather Bureau adopted its current name, National Weather Service (NWS), and was operating 29 VHF-FM weather-radio transmitters under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) which replaced ESSA in 1970.[1] The service was designed with boaters, fishermen, travelers and more in mind, allowing listeners to quickly receive a "life-saving" weather bulletin from their local weather forecast office (WFO), along with routinely updated forecasts and other climatological data in a condensed format at any time of the day or night. The general public could have the latest weather updates when they needed them, and the benefit of more lead-time to prepare during severe conditions. In 1974, NOAA Weather Radio (NWR), as it was now called, reached about 44 percent of the U.S. population over 66 nationwide transmitters.[3] NWR grew to over 300 stations by the late 1970s.[2]
Local NWS staff were the voices heard on NWR stations from its inception until the late 1990s when "Paul" was introduced.[5][6] The messages were recorded on tape, and later by digital means, then placed in the broadcast cycle. This technology limited the programming variability and locked it into a repetitive sequential order. It also slowed down the speed of warning messages when severe weather happened, because each NWS office could have up to eight transmitters.[5] "Paul" was a computerized voice using the DECtalk text-to-speech system.[5] "Paul's" voice was dissatisfactory and difficult to understand; thus "Craig", "Tom," "Donna" and later "Javier" were introduced in 2002 using the Speechify text-to-speech system from SpeechWorks (not to be confused with the iOS app of the same name).[5][6] A completely new voice from the VoiceText text-to-speech system, also named "Paul", was introduced in 2016 and implemented nationwide by late in the year. Live human voices are still used occasionally for weekly tests of the Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) and 1,050 Hz tone alerting systems, station IDs, and in the event of system failure or computer upgrades. They will also be used on some stations for updates on the time and radio frequency.
In the 1990s, the National Weather Service adopted plans to implement SAME technology nationwide; the roll-out moved slowly until 1995, when the U.S. government provided the budget needed to develop the SAME technology across the entire radio network. Nationwide implementation occurred in 1997 when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted the SAME standard as part of its new Emergency Alert System (EAS).[1] NOAA Weather Radio's public alerting responsibilities expanded from hazardous weather-only events to "all hazards" being broadcast.[7]
In the wake of the 1965 Palm Sunday tornado outbreak, one of the key recommendations from the U.S. Weather Bureau's storm survey team, was the establishment of a nationwide radio network that could be used to broadcast weather warnings to the general public, hospitals, key institutions, news media, schools, and the public safety community. Starting in 1966, the Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA) started a nationwide program known as "ESSA VHF Weather Radio Network." In the early 1970s, this was changed to NOAA Weather Radio.[8][4] The service was expanded to coastal locations during the 1970s in the wake of Hurricane Camille based upon recommendations made by the Department of Commerce after the storm in September 1969.[9]
Since then, a proliferation of stations have been installed and activated to ensure near-complete geographical coverage and "weather-readiness", many of which have been funded by state emergency management agencies in cooperation with the NOAA to expand the network, or state public broadcasting networks. To avoid interference and allow for more specific area coverage, the number of frequencies in use by multiple stations grew to two with the addition of 162.400 MHz in 1970 followed by the third (162.475) in 1975 with the remaining four (162.425, 162.450, 162.500 & 162.525) coming into use by 1981.[10][11][12][13]
In the 1950s, the Weather Bureau started with KWO35 in New York City and later added KWO39 in Chicago.[8] By 1965 it had added KID77 in Kansas City, home to the Severe Local Storms Center, as the third continuous VHF radio transmitter with the fourth, KBA99 in Honolulu, operating by January 1967.[14][15][16]
Denver became the 60th NWR station in September 1972 and by December 1976 there were roughly 100 stations transmitting on three channels in December 1976.[17][18]Growth accelerated in the mid-1970s with NWR reaching 200 radio stations in May 1978 with WXK49 in Memphis, Tennessee; 300 in September 1979 with WXL45 in Columbia, Missouri; and by 1988, the NWS operated about 380 stations covering approximately 90 percent of the nation's population.[19][20][21] This grew to over 500 radio stations by May 1999, and over 800 by the end of 2001.[22][1] As of January 2020, there were about 1,032 stations in operation in fifty states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and Saipan, with over 95% effective coverage.[23]
The NOAA Weather Radio network is provided as a public service by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA also provides secondary weather information, usually limited to marine storm warnings for sea vessels navigating the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to HF band "time stations" WWV and WWVH. These shortwave radio stations continuously broadcast time signals and disseminate the "official" U.S. Government time, and are operated by the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The radio service transmits weather and marine forecasts (where applicable) and other related information, without any interruptions. In addition, NWR works in cooperation with the FCC's Emergency Alert System (EAS), providing comprehensive severe weather alerts and civil emergency information. In conjunction with federal, state and local emergency managers and other public officials, NWR has the ability to broadcast alerts and post-event information for all types of hazards, including natural (such as earthquakes or avalanches), human-made (such as chemical releases or oil spills), technological (such as nuclear power plant emergencies) and other public safety (such as "AMBER alerts" or 9-1-1 telephone outages). Listening to a NOAA Weather Radio station requires a VHF radio receiver or scanner capable of receiving at least one of seven specific VHF-FM channels within the frequency range of 162.400 through 162.550 MHz, collectively known as the "Weather Band". For example, a receiver that only tunes in standard AM or FM broadcast stations will not suffice.
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