National Weather Service United States Department of Commerce

Lake Effect Snow through Saturday: A Series of Storms Impact the West

Lake effect snow showers will continue through Saturday downwind of Lakes Erie, Ontario and the eastern portion of Lake Superior. A series of storm systems will continue to impact California and the Pacific Northwest through the weekend and into next week, bringing widespread rainfall, mountain snowfall, and gusty winds. Coastal flooding is expected in northern California. 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: