A major winter storm will organize across the Northern Plains today and then rapidly strengthen as it moves into the Great Lakes on Sunday. Heavy snow and blowing snow are likely to persist over the Great Lakes into Monday night. Dry and gusty winds will produce a critical fire risk across the central/southern Plains. An early heatwave will begin to intensify over the western U.S. into next week. Read More >
| Degraded | Indicates station is experiencing a temporary degradation of service. |
| Out Of Service | Indicates station is temporarily out of service. |
State Selection for County Coverage
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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:
NWR RSS Feed