National Weather Service United States Department of Commerce

Heavy Rain and Flooding Concerns in Hawaii; Severe Weather this Weekend in the Plains; Pacific Storm in the West

A storm system near the Hawaiian Islands is expected to bring periods of heavy rainfall, strong winds, and isolated strong to severe thunderstorms through Friday. Several rounds of severe thunderstorms are forecast to impact parts of the Great Plains into the Midwest this weekend into next week. Moderate to heavy rainfall and high elevation snow is expected this weekend over California and Oregon. 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: