National Weather Service United States Department of Commerce

Heat Wave Continues in the West; Critical Fire Weather Conditions in the High Plains

An anomalously early heat wave will continue to intensify and expand across the West and Southwest as the week progresses. Numerous daily and potentially monthly record highs are expected to be broken. Critical fire weather conditions will continue over the next couple of days across portions of the High Plains as gusty winds and dry conditions persist. Read More >

Degraded Indicates station is experiencing a temporary degradation of service.
Out Of Service Indicates station is temporarily out of service.

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County Partial County Description SAME Location Code Station ID Frequency Status
 

 

NWR County Coverage Help

Partial County Description

Users with NWR receivers equipped with Specific Area Message Encoding can program their radios with a 6-digit county code to receive alerts for one or more counties. The NWS also sends warnings to the Emergency Alert System (EAS). Broadcasters use EAS to interrupt programming for vital NWS warnings.

Because NWR is county based, if an NWS office forecasts that even a small part of a county is impacted by a storm, the entire county is alerted. Both NWR and EAS allow NWS to divide a county into 2-9 partitions, each having a unique 6-digit code. More than 10 years ago, four NWS offices (Duluth, MN; Glasgow, MT, Rapid City, SD,  and Tucson, AZ) successfully implemented partial county codes. Most SAME-equipped NWR receivers can read these codes. By using the SAME partial county location codes, these WFOs have successfully issued warnings for predefined parts of a county, substantially reducing the “False Alarm Area” and “listener fatigue.”

Resources to learn more about partial county alerting are listed below: