NOAA Weather
Radio 2000
The nationwide modernization of the NWS is bringing NOAA
Weather Radio 2000 to every forecast office in the country.
With NOAA Weather Radio 2000, forecasts and statements
will automatically and instantaneously go straight from
the NWS forecaster to the NOAA Weather Radio 2000 and out
onto the airways saving 5 to 10 minutes or more. There will
be no delay in critical weather information and warnings
and even more timely forecast and observations. As soon
as we issue a product, it is inserted into broadcast cycle.
Also, as soon as product expires, it is gone. This means
that the broadcast will always be fresh.
The NOAA Weather Radio 2000 will allow us to program specific
products to air at specific times. If you are interested
in a specialized product, such as the River Forecast and
Summary, you will know exactly when to tune in. This will
eliminate the uncertainty of the old deck driven system.
It will allow us to make and publicize a broadcast schedule.
However, significant warning information will always have
a number one priority on NOAA Weather Radio and override
normal programming.
NOAA Weather Radio 2000 will directly feed into the Specific
Area Message Encoder (SAME) for
use by specialized receivers and the new Emergency Alert
System (EAS).
In the past, warnings and watches where alerted manually.
The manual choosing and pressing of a series of buttons
could lead to human error causing mistakes in the digital
code that is broadcasted. Automation of the manual entry
eliminates these errors and speeds up the process of broadcasting
the warnings.
NOAA Weather Radio 2000 offers many benefits as mentioned
and allows us to free up staff to focus on the process of
detecting severe weather and providing accurate and timely
warnings to you. However, NOAA Weather Radio 2000 does use
an automated computer voice that
will be a noticeable change from our current NOAA Weather
Radio broadcasts. It will take some getting use to, especially
people who have grown accustomed to hearing our voices over
the radio and have come to know us.
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