Talk:List of National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices

Regions

How exactly are these region classifications made? Because this might seem unimportant, but the state of Oklahoma is far closer to the center of the United States than Michigan. Just look at a map! Its ridiculous! These classifications of regions look like they need to be revised to a degree. Perhaps a new Northern region? And a better definition of what is in the central area of the United States. It looks like the divisions may have been taken from the US government itself. In that case, that area of the United States that some people refer to the as the Midwestern United States should not be referred to as the central United States, because a large portion of the Midwest is nowhere even close to the geographic center of the United States.

If we were going to list the WFOs, of course we are talking about NWS administrative regions. HkCaGu (talk) 20:34, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

Modification 1: It looks like the divisions may have been taken from the US government itself. In that case, that area of the United States that some people refer to the as the Midwestern United States should not be referred to as the central United States, because a large portion of the Midwest is nowhere even close to the geographic center of the United States.

Modification 2: I understand that the government might be the group referring to the Midwest as being the central United States. In that case, this should be noted, because although the government might call Michigan part of the central United States does not actually make it so. I have reason to believe that the government has given these regions their names only for the sake of convenience. At the absolute least, please add a reference somewhere that mentions why these names were given, if possible. Sorry to rant, but I am just irritated because this is a case of simple geography. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dustin V. S. (talk • contribs) 20:45, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

There are likely too many NWS regions, but the last time that a regional headquarters (NWS Southern Region) was proposed to be closed (in the 1990s by former head of the NWS, "Joe" Friday), it didn't go over too well politically. I agree that the current NWS regional classification looks strange to anyone that knows something about U.S. geography, but it's been that way for as long as I can remember. FYI, I've been a meteorologist for over 20 years and much of that was spent working for the NWS - for whom I don't work for (or speak on behalf of) anymore. Guy1890 (talk) 21:01, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

United States geography is irrelevant in this article here. All we're doing is listing WFOs by the NWS Region under which they're administered. What a region is is explained in the very first sentence, and the listing uses capitalized "Region" (administrative) instead of "region" (which would have been geographical). And we are talking about Central Region not Central United States. Office policies often depend on the region to which they belong. I strongly oppose any "modification" to make anything "geographical". HkCaGu (talk) 02:02, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

To be clear, obviously, there's not going to be any modification to the article in question here based on the above concerns. Guy1890 (talk) 05:00, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Template for relevant articles

A template has been created based off of this article here: Template:List of National Weather Service Weather forecast offices It should be useful on the different forecast office pages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dustin V. S. (talk • contribs) 01:41, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

URLs for "Central Region" WFOs

Does anyone mind telling me when all the websites moved from crh.noaa.gov to just weather.gov? I noticed this a good while ago, but I only now thought to ask. Dustin (talk) 20:34, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

I dunno, but the NWS has been trying to standardize their WFO webpages for quite a while now. I know in Eastern Region (I think after Tropical Storm Irene knocked out some infrastructure down at ER Headquarters?) for many months one had to click-through some bogus initial website that said something like "Please excuse us while we are transitioning to a new webpage format". Now all those webpages are all pretty much all in that same crappy format, which has taken a lot of individuality & utility out of their websites. The NWS almost seems like they are trying to focus more on their social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) presence than their own websites. Guy1890 (talk) 03:08, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

@Guy1890: Okay. Thanks for the response. In my opinion, it would be good if the other regions would become like the Southern Region which has the best format in my opinion. I tend to use the Norman WFO's website more than the others, but I see that most of the Southern Region offices have similarly formatted webpages. The ERH and CRH websites are not very easy to navigate in my opinion, so I'm not a fan, and WRH is still not as good as SRH IMO. Sorry if I've turned this discussion into me just giving my opinion. Thanks again for the reply. Dustin (talk) 05:30, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

I believe that the Central Region made the change about the end of April or beginning of May (or maybe the beginning of April?). I agree, you know there is a problem when government entities start screwing stuff up to cater to social media crap. By the end of the year, the SRH and WRH will be switched over (to provide more unity and make it more uniform, of course). United States Man (talk) 15:13, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

@United States Man: You don't have to read this if you don't want to; I got a bit carried away. - I'm not comfortable about such a change either, but while I think that such a change would quite possibly make it harder to navigate the websites and let WFOs put less on their main pages, I don't think that means we will necessarily have a loss of information. For example, take NWS Wichita - Its main page is almost depressingly empty apart from the warning box and the "weather story", radar, and weather map below (at least empty compared to offices in the Southern Region such as NWS Norman and NWS Tulsa to its south (on a side note, Tulsa's main page is similar but slightly different from the other Southern Region offices with numbers to click rather than tabs). However, if you hover your cursor over "local information" (on the right side), you can still access an event archive and other information. It's not too hard to imagine how this would affect a WFO like Jackson, MS which has linear pages like this (they could probably just stick links to the pages under something similar to Wichita's "local information" hover-button thing, plus Jackson's weather pages such as this one tend to only be on one page), but I really have to wonder how this would apply to an SRH office like Norman's (sorry to use this example so much, but the Norman WFO has more to its website than most so I think it's a good example, and I use it more often), which has a more tree-like arrangement and has multiple pages for a single weather event (when it is significant and/or severe weather-related) such as this. Take a look at San Anjelo's page - there are multiple tabs with some relevant weather information you can look at. Now let's go back to the Wichita WFO - it has something similar to the Southern Region WFOs' tabs but it is labeled "Weather Story". From the looks of it, there can only be one "Weather Story" graphic for a WFO at a time, though, and even after this website format change, only Central Region offices have "Weather Story" graphics, which remain absent from Eastern Region websites. All that said, it looks like the biggest impact from such a change would be to WFO websites' main pages, but there would still be some other changes from what I can tell. One more thing to take note of is that when I refer to one of the NWS regions, while WFOs in a certain region are generally consistent in some way or another, there are outliers such as the Memphis, Tennessee WFO. Sorry if I made this too long. So, how easy was it to read my wall of text? Dustin (talk) 15:59, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

I agree, I don't think there will be a very big loss of information. In looking for storm surveys in the ERH since the change, I have noticed that most of the information is still there, just in different places. However, if the office (or whoever) does not update the urls and bother to organize anything, it does appear there will be at least a temporary loss of some of the information (such as storm surveys from NWS Paducah - I only found three here). I don't think it is all bad, it will just take some getting used to. United States Man (talk) 16:23, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

The formatting rules for websites in the NWS tend to come down from on high, and then the local WFOs usually just have to scramble around to find places in the new, required format to shoehorn in the info that they want to display. If what you're looking for is primarily storm surveys or studies for use as citations in Wikipedia articles, I doubt that kind of info will be removed from NWS websites, since it's something that individual WFOs like to toot their own horns about (in terms of "hey, look at all the local studies that our office is doing!"). Pretty much all the Regional Headquarters have some kind of involvement in at least reviewing those studies before they are posted online, not that they were always helpful in that regard...in my own previous experience that is. You'll just have to click around to try & find what you want.

The "best" example that I can give from past experience was when the NWS decided to try & standardize all of the Climate information on most NWS websites. I can't say that those pages became easier to navigate in the end, but the new format did provide at least some small flexibility to display pretty much all of the info that a particular WFO wanted to display. They just had to find a place in the new, required format for it. There's a fine line between change for the sake of change and change to try & keep things looking "fresh & new" online. Guy1890 (talk) 06:32, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Missing office articles

Why don't all the local forecast offices have articles? None are inherently more or less notable than the rest. --Bigpoliticsfan (talk) 18:39, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

That is true, however it may be more efficient to have a separate article or a list within -this- one which lists notable historical events of each WFO. For example, the "scandal" surrounding KOKX (Upton, NY) intentionally choosing not to downgrade a snowfall forecast because they believed the public would ignore the hazards. Psx1337 (talk) 19:03, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Section on or small write-up on WFO abbreviation origin in cases where it's not obvious?

May it be wise to add some information about WFO abbreviations where the origin of the abbreviation isn't clearly obvious? For example, anyway, KOKX in Upton, New York which covers Southern (half of) Connecticut Counties, New York City - Not sure how/where they arrived at "OKX". Anyway, not a big deal but thought I'd bring it up. Psx1337 (talk) 19:01, 14 February 2020 (UTC)