PDA

View Full Version : Fun weather these days


Wogsterca
06-09-08, 07:30 PM
For two days now, we have had a good old fashioned heat wave, and last night we had all kinds of nasty weather, associated with the instability that comes with heat waves.

Those of you who are outside the US and Canada can stop reading, the rest of this doesn't apply to you.....

In the United States, The National Weather Service, and in Canada, The Meteorological Service of Canada (a department of Environment Canada) have developed weather radio services, In the last couple of years, Environment Canada has adopted the SAME encoding used successfully for the last few years in the United States.

Special radio units called weather radios are able to receive specially encoded warnings broadcast by NWS (http://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/nwrsame.htm) and MSC (http://www.msc-smc.ec.gc.ca/msb/weatheradio/index_e.cfm) to alert you of serious weather conditions. One of the problems is that you can go from bright and sunny, to the middle of a severe thunderstorm in under an hour. If you like long trips, and go out on days when this kind of situation can occur, you really should purchase one of these radios, set it to your local weather radio station, pop in the SAME codes for your area, and set the volume nice and high so you can hear the warning indicator, and put it in a jersey pocket. Then if a warning is issued, you at least have time to take cover. The Links above are to the weather radio information for each organization.

v1k1ng1001
06-09-08, 09:53 PM
What do these radios look like?

Wogsterca
06-10-08, 07:22 AM
What do these radios look like?

They are sometimes called weather alert radios, most places like crappy shack have them, not sure about worst buy or ( short ) circuit city......

CliftonGK1
06-10-08, 10:08 AM
Most radio scanners and some CB radios have NOAA frequencies as a pre-set. I was glad to have the feature on my CB when I drove cross-country a couple years ago, since I was racing a snowstorm to the Cascade Mtn passes.