A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Radio can help Mississippi residents monitor dangerous storms. The weather radio transmits severe weather alerts and informs the public of dangerous conditions before they arrive.
The National Weather Service broadcasts forecasts, severe weather warnings and weather watches 24 hours a day over the NOAA radio network. A watch means that potentially life-threatening weather is headed toward your area. A warning means that potentially life-threatening weather is imminent or already occurring.
Broadcasts cover natural incidents such as hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, thunderstorms and winter storms. The network also provides information on topics such as oil spills, 911 telephone outages, AMBER alerts and terrorist attacks. Broadcasts also are translated into Spanish.
Weather radios are available at electronics stores at prices ranging from $20 to $200. Here are some features you should look for when purchasing one:
- Alarm tone - the radio is silent, producing a special tone only when severe weather approaches.
- Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) - provides area-specific information by filtering out alerts that do not affect your immediate area.
- Hand crank or battery operated - A radio should be able to operate on batteries or be hand-cranked to produce operating power.
- Tunable to all NWS frequencies - Visit www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr for frequencies.
- For the hearing and visually impaired - allows radios to connect the alarms to other attention-getting devices like personal computers and text printers.
