With tornado season in full force, and hurricane season just on the horizon, National Weather Services (NWS) offices across the country are managing a series of required updates for their radio stations.

NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards (NWR) is a nationwide network of radio stations broadcasting continuous weather information directly from the nearest NWS office.

According to the NWS website, beginning this spring, NWR stations have been taken out of service for 2-3 days for a “necessary scheduled system update.” This process is ongoing.

NOAA Public Affairs Specialist Erica Grow Cei said these staggered updates are required, prescheduled and are being done to every single weather forecast station in the country, sometimes with multiple transmitters down at one time. According to a NWS statement out of Birmingham, Ala., this downtime will be used to update NWS offices’ Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System, or AWIPS.

In total, 122 weather forecast offices are responsible for more than 1,000 NWR transmitters, covering all 50 states in addition to Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the U.S. Pacific territories.

One veteran broadcast consulting engineer active in national broadcast technology issues thinks it’s “a bad time of year to be doing this.”

“NOAA/NWS still does not publish their alerts via IPAWS/CAP; their spokesperson may be unaware that when these transmitters are off the air, there would never be an EAS alert on radio, television or cable systems in the areas, should there be a transmitter off-air during these upgrades coinciding with a storm," Alan Jurison, a member of the NAB Radio Technology Committee and a former senior operations engineer for iHeartMedia told TV Tech sister brand Radio World. “The majority of actual EAS alerts that are aired come from NOAA Weather Radio. While NOAA/NWS published notices about these outages to other sources, the broadcast community should have been better warned.

Jurison called for the NOAA/NWS to complete the IPAWS/CAP link.

“The alerting and broadcast communities have been waiting for decades,” he said. “It would improve alert quality as well as redundancy when NOAA Weather Radio stations are off the air. Until redundant alerts can be sent to EAS Participants via IPAWS/CAP, these NOAA Weather Radio outages should be postponed to periods where no significant weather is expected for several days.”

Grow Cei was not able to confirm exactly when these updates started or when they’re scheduled to finish; however, NOAA on its website said the updates will be done on a rolling basis across the country through June 2025.

Radio World first heard reports of these updates from engineers in Southern Florida. Previously, from April 21 to April 23, the National Weather Service said NWR transmitters serving West Central and Southwest Florida would be off the air. The NWS Tampa Bay office communicated that news over social media, although Grow Cei says there are multiple ways NOAA disseminates information about scheduled maintenance and severe weather.

She said news is often communicated through public information statements posted on individual NWS websites, in addition to regular check-ins with “core partners” such as local emergency management offices.

Grow Cei said NOAA also uses the communications platform Slack to notify its partners in advance.

On Tuesday, May 20, Grow Cei said Marquette, Mich., is the only location she knows of where NWR transmitters are down.

“If you don’t own a NOAA weather radio, then you won’t notice a difference. But we do encourage everyone to get one,” she said. “That is the only thing that is currently out of service in Marquette, Mich. This upgrade doesn’t change a forecast office’s ability to get out these warnings.”

Radio World, however, has seen notices of other scheduled transmitter outages this week, including in Birmingham, which has severe weather in its forecast. These temporary outages have raised concerns as the U.S. continues to face natural disasters this month. Just this past weekend, Kentucky and Missouri were heavily impacted by tornadoes, with at least 25 deaths reported.

NWR requires a special radio receiver or scanner capable of picking up the signal. Broadcasts are found in the VHF public service band at these seven frequencies (MHz): 162.400, 162.425, 162.450, 162.475, 162.500, 162.525 and 162.550.

While these updates are taking place, Grow Cei said there are other ways to receive life-saving weather information. These include text alerts, wireless emergency alerts and information via the NWS website and social media accounts.

“We always encourage people to have multiple ways to receive weather alerts,” she said. “NOAA shouldn’t be your only way.”

To learn if your NWR station has been scheduled for updates, click here and then on the office in your area to visit its website.

WASHINGTON—The nation’s largest originators of emergency alerts have come together to advise the industry group behind the Advanced Warning and Response Network. Designed to work synergistically with existing alerting systems, AWARN will provide major new capabilities to improve disaster warning and recovery information for the American public.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children, the National Weather Service, and the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials have joined the new AWARN Advisory Committee to provide technical and operational input to the AWARN Alliance.

By leveraging the powerful new features of next-generation broadcasting, the AWARN Alliance is creating a system that can deliver geo-targeted, rich-media emergency messages to a wide range of enabled consumer devices, including 4K UHD TVs, tablets, smart phones and even connected cars. Television broadcasters and consumer technology companies are planning for the voluntary adoption of Next-Gen TV transmission, based on the new ATSC 3.0 technical standard, pending approval by the Federal Communications Commission, expected later this year.

“Our goal in developing AWARN is to create the world’s most advanced emergency alerting system, and Next-Gen TV provides the tools to do that,” said John Lawson, executive director of the AWARN Alliance. “Our public safety partners will help us define how to use those tools to create messages that save lives and speed recovery,” he said.

“Without broadcasters, AMBER Alert would not be the successful system we have today. Once again, broadcasters will enable the growth of AMBER Alerts and enhance the current alerting system by adopting new technology,” said Robert Lowery Jr., vice president of the Missing Children Division of the NCMEC. “Alerts through ATSC 3.0 will provide rich, useful information to the public, whom law enforcement depends on to be their eyes and ears during the most critical child abductions. We are looking forward to working with AWARN to help define and implement these next-generation protocols.”

NWS Meteorologist Mike Gerber recognizes the promise of advanced emergency alerting with ATSC 3.0. “The National Weather Service is pleased to serve as a technical adviser on the AWARN Advisory Committee as we work collectively to build a Weather-Ready Nation,” he said.

Examples of the rich media alerts enabled by the AWARN system include photos, surveillance video, storm tracks, inundation maps, evacuation routes, road hazards, airborne chemical plume models and safety instructions. AWARN can provide post-event information, such as shelter locations, hospital wait times and other recovery notifications—even if cellular networks and the electric grid are down. AWARN may also deliver Blue Alerts and other law enforcement messages.

APCO International is the world’s oldest and largest organization of public safety communications professionals, including those at Public Safety Answering Points who issue local emergency alerts. FEMA manages the current Emergency Alert System, including the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. NCMEC issues AMBER missing child alerts in cooperation with state and local law enforcement agencies. The National Weather Service issues severe weather alerts, accounting for 90 percent of EAS activations each year.

The AWARN Alliance membership includes commercial and public broadcasters who reach over 85 percent of U.S. households, the National Association of Broadcasters, the Consumer Technology Association, the Interactive Television Alliance, and a growing number of U.S. and Korean technology companies and service providers.

AWARN Alliance and Advisory Committee members plan to convene working groups in the second half of the year. The Alliance’s goal is to have a beta version of AWARN alerts available for early adopter television stations that launch Next-Gen TV transmission in 2018.

Members of the AWARN Alliance, as of July 7, 2017
Broadcasters (Commercial)
Capitol Broadcasting Company
Pearl TV
Sinclair Broadcast Group

Broadcasters (Public)
Kentucky Educational Television
KPBS/California State University-San Diego
UNC-TV/University of North Carolina
WKAR/Michigan State University
WNET/New York

Technology Companies
Aircode
Airwavz
LG Electronics/Zenith
Lokita Solutions/DigiCap
ONE Media
Monroe Electronics/Digital Alert Systems
Triveni Digital

Trade Association
Consumer Technology Association
Interactive Television Alliance
National Association of Broadcasters

Service Providers
AEA Implementation Team (ATSC)
Convergence Services, Inc.
MHz Networks
Wiley Rein, LLC