Old Weather Radio Technology Still Most Trusted For Tracking Monsoons In Arizona
Weather Radio is the steady stream of rough messages broadcast 24/7 and picked up by your favorite radio stations when the weather turns.
They’re a nearly daily occurrence in Arizona right now, warning of flash flooding in Douglas, winds in Tucson, and severe storms just outside Phoenix.
"For your protection, move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building ..."
This recent broadcast in Nogales warned people to move to the first floor of whatever building they were in. And if it sounds a little garbled, there’s a reason for that. Dan Leins is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Tucson.
Scientist and meteorologist Dan Leins demonstrates the NOAA Weather Radio at the National Weather Service in Tucson.
"They got their start with a person who would go live on the radio when they had active weather going on. They would either speak live or do recordings on tape. And that would play back over and over and over again. That would run 24/7 if there was active weather in the middle of the night," Leins said.
It’s a technology from the last century. In fact, before Twitter, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Radio All Hazards — or, Weather Radio — was intended as a way for the president to reach the country.
"If there’s a natural disaster, if there was a nuclear disaster, the system was designed to pick up broadcasts like that and redistribute them nationally instantly. That was one of the main purposes that NOAA weather radio all hazards was deployed."
Those recordings have become a disembodied audio legacy of the country’s deadliest weather events. Here’s Weather Radio’s Aug. 28, 2005, chilling broadcast of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans:
"Persons, pets and livestock exposed to the winds will face certain death if struck. Power outages will last for weeks, as most power poles will be down and transformers destroyed. Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards."
The quality of these recordings isn’t that of Alexa or Siri on your smartphone.
But the broadcast from July 16 is years ahead of the quality of this 2009 alert:
"We want to make it sound as close to a human being as possible. It’s tough to do. But we want to make sure it’s clear. The pronunciations are correct. The inflections are correct. Things like that. So we have done a lot of work to try and get it to the point where it’s easily understandable by as many people as possible," Leins said.
In the sweeping green vistas of Sahuarita, with a looming shaft of thundercloud over Helmet Peak, is where these broadcasts start. Scott Boone is a ham radio operator and a member of SkyWarn, a network of 200,000 storm spotters throughout the nation
"They show us what's severe, what not to report. And then those people are assigned a weather spotter number and then you can use that to call in and report, they know you’re a trained weather spotter," he said.
The Weather Service’s Leins said, "A lot that’s evolved since NOAA Weather Radio came out 50, 60 years ago."
"We certainly have a lot of ways now to get the message out. But it’s still here and we’re still using it to this day to make sure people get the message that they need," he said.
