National Weather Service United States Department of Commerce

Heat and Fire Weather Concerns in the West

Heat will build over the Intermountain West and the Southwest the next couple of days. Lightning from dry thunderstorms can create new fire starts and combined with gusty winds may cause a fire to rapidly grow in Oregon and northern California. Elevated fire weather conditions are also expected in the Great Basin. Flash flooding will be possible in Arizona and west Texas, especially in burn scars. Read More >

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), will conduct a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) on Wednesday Oct 3, 2018. This test will simulate a Presidential Alert message. The National Weather Service in Seattle will participate in the EAS portion of this test, relaying the National Periodic Test (NPT) message across the NOAA Weather Radio network in Western Washington. Please note that NOAA Weather Radios with Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) receiving capabilities that are set up to alert for NPT messages will alarm for this test as will tone-alert radios.

  • The WEA portion of this test will commence at 11:18 AM PDT.
  • The EAS portion of this test will commence at 11:20 AM PDT.

For more detailed information on this national test, please visit: https://www.fema.gov/Emergency-Alert-Test