2013 Winter Weather Awareness Week is December 8-14th

This week is Winter Weather Awareness Week [Alternate Link] in North Carolina and I would like to focus on the NOAA Weather Radio as a tool to alert people to potentially severe weather.

Unlike outdoor sirens, all-hazards radios save lives by alerting people who are indoors when severe weather approaches. They can also alert people in homes, schools and businesses to other types of emergencies.

These radios provide constant, useful and up-to-date weather information. They are equipped with a special alarm tone that will sound an alert and give immediate information in a life-threatening situation.

During an emergency, the National Weather Service will interrupt routine weather radio programming and broadcast a special tone that activates weather radios, by county, in the listening areas.While they are primarily used for severe weather alerts, authorities can also use these radios to issue warnings about other types of hazards, such as chemical spills or biological hazards. The hearing and visually impaired can also get these warnings by connecting weather radios to other attention-getting devices such as strobe lights, pagers, bed-shakers, personal computers and text printers.

The NOAA Transmitters that cover Macon County are:

WWG82 in Robbinsville, NC operating on 162.525 Mhz
Coverage Map

KXI81 in Clayton, GA operating on 162.450 Mhz 

Coverage Map

Here is an example of a NOAA Weather Radio in action from March 2, 2012 in Franklin, NC. [The alarm goes off in the background beginning at the 25 second mark in the audio]

The SAME Code to program into your radio for Macon County is 037113. You will have to consult the manual for your particular radio on how to program it. If you do not have a manual for your radio, please let us know in the comments by telling us what kind of radio you have and what the model number is and we will assist you as best we can.

If you do not live in Macon County, please consult this map for information on NOAA transmitters where you live.

For more information on the NOAA Weather Radio program, please visit the National Weather Service website.