NWS Anchorage Public (land) and Marine Zone Changes (March 2026)

The National Weather Service (NWS) issues messages for geographical areas that Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) pre-determine, called forecast zones, across land and sea. For land-based forecast zones, these are referred to as “public forecast zones.” For marine environments, these are referred to as "marine forecast zones." 

In an effort to continue to redefine our forecast zones, and be more in-tune with regional and local forecast needs, our forecast office worked closely with local community leadership and incorporated climatology, alert needs, and locally-identifiable naming conventions in the implementation of these new forecast changes. With this March’s forecast zone upgrade, NWS WFO Anchorage will make a series of edits to previous forecast zones. We believe this will provide a vast improvement to those who live and transit through the effected areas across Southern Alaska. 

For the complete list of anticipated changes to forecast zone names and numbers, please refer to the Service Change Notice (SCN - coming out this winter). Zone change implementation will occur in March 2026. 

For higher bandwidth users, please visit the StoryMap to visualize the previous zone changes. Planned zone changes will appear on this site in the coming months.

The updated Service Change Notice and updated shapefiles can be found here in the coming months.

Stay tuned to view the related press release.

IMPORTANT

NWS partners and users should take the appropriate action to ensure systems recognize the new UGCs and new zone alignments and names. In addition, NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards (NWR) listeners using receivers equipped with Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) will need to add new SAME location codes to their receivers prior to March 2026. 

Current Forecast Zones

The NWS issues forecasts, watches, and warnings for public, fire and marine weather by zones. Local effects such as elevation or proximity to large bodies of water can cause highly variable weather across zones.

More on Dissemination

One of the ways the National Weather Service disseminates information is by broadcasting official watches, warnings, forecasts, and other hazard information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via the NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards (NWR). This message alerting system functions based on areas defined by borough, census area, municipality, county and parish boundaries.

In hopes of providing quality public support, NWS Anchorage has been working on a multi-year, multi-phase effort to align forecast zone boundaries with borough, municipality, and census area boundaries, in addition to capturing microclimates in familiar naming conventions.  With the implementation of these forecast zone changes by WFO Anchorage in March 2026, there should be a reduction in issues noted since the previous update in the last few years.

Large Scale Comparison of Forecast Zone Changes along the Aleutian Chain 

Akutan Island is currently grouped with the West Aleutian Census Area, when in fact, it's part of Aleutians East Borough. Akutan will will grouped correctly into the appropriate Borough, aligning alerting needs. This will also aid with known wind climatology in the Unimak Pass and areas east within the Borough.

In March 2026, Akutan will be part of Land-Based zone PKZ781. This zone will be renamed "Aleutians East Borough." The offshore marine zones will be pulled west to align with the new land-based zone, helping to capture the gap winds in the area, and a new Coastal Waters Marine Zones (out to about 15 NM) will be created and called PKZ768, or "Unimak Pass." 

Other naming convention changes will be made to eliminate confusion communicated to the NWS:

• AKZ781: Alaska Peninsula → will now be called "Aleutians East Borough" as previously stated
• AKZ785: Eastern Aleutians → will now be called "Unalaska and Nikolski"
• AKZ787: Central Aleutians → will now be called "Atka and Adak"
• AKZ791: Western Aleutians → will now be called "Shemya and Attu Islands"

Large Scale Comparison of Forecast Zone Changes along the Susitna Valley

The Petersville community was split into three separate land-base zones: 745, 746 and 747. This will be fixed in March 2026. See image below. This change will also reflect the river basin more accurately and give the 745 zone a stronger identity.

Other Changes to WFO Anchorage Forecast Area Zone Names

Coming soon.

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