NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards (NWR) is a nationwide network of transmitters broadcasting weather forecasts, conditions and alerts directly from the closest National Weather Service office. In addition, NWR broadcasts information about non-weather threats -- earthquakes. chemical spills, AMBER alerts, 911 system outages and more.The biggest difference between today's NWR receivers and older weather radios is something called Specific Area Message Encoding technology, or SAME, which makes it possible to program a receiver for a particular county or locality. Once set up, the receiver will respond only to broadcast alerts within the area programmed.
The KintlaLake household relies on a pair of SAME-capable Midland WR-100 units (MSRP $50, street price $30 or less). One sits on a table in the master bedroom and the other lives in our basement shelter.The WR-100 can operate on either plug-in AC or on-board AAs. I've set a reminder in my Palm Pre to replace the batteries annually, and we keep fresh spares near each radio. Also, because we live in a corner of our county, we've programmed our WR-100s with SAME IDs for two neighboring counties as well.
Throughout yesterday, meteorologists were forecasting nasty storms overnight and, sure enough, our bedroom receiver began barking shortly after midnight. It makes me cranky (to say the least) to drag my ass out of bed and across the room to silence alerts for severe thunderstorm warnings, but I'd rather know than not know.
By 2am we were under a tornado watch. I was still awake when the tornado warning came in at 2:30am.
We woke the 16-year-old, grabbed the dogs and took refuge in the basement. The NWS gave our village the all-clear an hour later, and my wife and the spawn returned to bed. I brewed a pot of coffee and stayed up to watch local news.
According to reports, a tornado touched down several miles south of here and straight-line winds in excess of 100mph were recorded to our northeast. Our immediate surrounds got quite a blow but escaped essentially without damage -- just heavy rain and downed limbs.
Our weather radios gave us a heads-up to the threat, however, providing us with the information we needed to protect ourselves. Along with a shortwave receiver, a couple of multi-band scanners and a handful of GMRS transceivers, they're invaluable components of this family's comm system.
