NOAA Warning Setup

Thanks to carterlake for this FAQ entry!

Proper way to setup NOAA Advisories

In order to setup the proper advisory, you need to determine what NOAA zone code to use. The easiest way to do this is go to www.noaa.gov

Type in your city and state and hit the GO button.

This will take you to a weather page for your city. Up in the URL is the NOAA zone code we want:

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/forecasts/NEZ052.php?warncounty=NEC055&city=Omaha

So now we know we need NEZ052 if we want to use the zone for Omaha, Nebraska.

Next we need to open Weather Display (WD) and go to SETUP… CONTROL PANEL… and click on the NOAA warnings icon.

This will open the NOAA warnings menu.

The first thing you want to do is select your state or US protectorate (sorry US only) in the pull down. In this case, it’s Nebraska.

Next you want to put in the zone we researched earlier “NEZ052”.

But before we do that, I need to explain a little bit about where this data is coming from and why you don’t want to just put in NEZ052. Brian, the creator and developer of WD, uses the NOAA experimental XML to find advisories. How WD does this is to search through the XML looking for “NEZ052”. There are times when it finds this in the wrong place. Therefore, I have found that adding a pound sign to one end and a period to the other allows for 100% accurate matching of the correct zone advisory.

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/alerts/

So I enter “#NEZ052.” as shown.

Next, we check “Remember next time” so we don’t lose our settings.

All settings below that are optional. I also have checked “Auto update every 10 minutes” so that it’s always checking for new advisories.

And that’s it! Hit OK to exit and you’re good to go.

A nice little add on to this FAQ

carterlake has written a “javascript advisory scroll” and has kindly shared it with us.

To get the code, and see it in action, see this thread:

http://discourse.weather-watch.com/t/8994