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NOAA weather stations available online

S

SnottyNose799

Banned
Sorry if this is the wrong forum for this topic, but feel free to move or delete if not allowed.

Anyway I found a link with various NOAA weather stations around the US to stream them.
Some say offline, some have funny static or electrical humming noises mixed in, still some are broadcasting just static as if the transmitters died, and some are repeating the same message "temporarily off-air". One sounds like a live microphone eavesdropping...

NOAA Weather Radio Online: Listen to local channels | weatherUSA

www.weatherusa.net www.weatherusa.net

But the biggest surprise--the government still has some working ok if it weren't for the terrible automated voice they all use. It's called NeoSpeech Paul, you can find lots of demos of it on YouTube. I think they need to get a new voice/speaker, LOL.

The one in my area is playing electrical hum. It at least also broadcasts rotating messages like usual, but is not streaming now.
 
Actually I'm not sure why NOAA is even still on-air... The voice isn't nearly as good as reading info on your phone. The stations wasting power repeating the message about "temporarily off-air" might as well let cellular antennas take their place.
 
They continue to be maintained by NOAA because the public values them for their geocoded SAME alerts to compatible receivers -- which are popular in areas prone to sudden weather hazards like flash floods and tornadoes.

Not everyone owns a smartphone, especially among the elderly.
 
As someone who lives in a rural area with limited cell service at their house in an area that receives multiple severe thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches and the occasional tornado warning, I depend on the NOAA weather radio station to keep my spouse and I safe. While the voice may sound strange, if it can save lives, then I will deal with it.
 
Michi said:
As someone who lives in a rural area with limited cell service at their house in an area that receives multiple severe thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches and the occasional tornado warning, I depend on the NOAA weather radio station to keep my spouse and I safe. While the voice may sound strange, if it can save lives, then I will deal with it.
Click to expand...
I never understood why they switched to the robotic voices in the first place. Originally, every NOAA broadcast frequency aired periodically-updated loops of humans reading various forecasts. They were always clear and easy to understand, at least where I live. In fact, as I recall, the first robotic voice technology the NWS adopted when they got rid of the human forecast readers was particularly unintelligible -- way worse than what's there now.
 
Michi said:
As someone who lives in a rural area with limited cell service at their house in an area that receives multiple severe thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches and the occasional tornado warning, I depend on the NOAA weather radio station to keep my spouse and I safe. While the voice may sound strange, if it can save lives, then I will deal with it.
Click to expand...
With all the advances in synthesized text-to-speech, why then does NOAA Weather radio still have the robotic qualities of a 2007-vintage Garmin GPS?
 
yeoldeschool said:
I never understood why they switched to the robotic voices in the first place.
Click to expand...
There were a couple of things going on simultaneously:
1. The NWS consolidated from ~200 offices to ~120 offices during the Clinton Administration.
2. NOAA Weather Radio was expanded to nationwide coverage, instead of one transmitter per office.

The expansion of the network made live announcers a bigger financial burden, so the synthesized voice was launched. The computerization also made it faster to disseminate weather alerts when needed, since the synthesizer can start reading as soon as the text is available, with no queueing.

Chad-Stevens said:
With all the advances in synthesized text-to-speech, why then does NOAA Weather radio still have the robotic qualities of a 2007-vintage Garmin GPS?
Click to expand...
The voice hasn't been updated in 10 years.
 
A "problem" when you replace any legacy technology is the required backwards compatibility issue. Also you have to insure spare parts for a decade or three. One issue they are complaining about it is the "copper" wire communications. I have personally work around "FAA" circuits*. True they are copper to the site but Atlanta they were buried, and didn't go thru switch. Kinda like the old "balance pair" that stations use to use for STLs back in the day. The real issue is the "long distance" link between the distant working tower and the remote site (in this case Newark) which most likely is mostly fiber. If it was a cut cable the fix would not be in less than an hour no matter if it was copper or fiber.

Any buried cable can be wiped out by an errant "lowest bidder" crew with a back hoe or a ditch witch. I will never forget when a "crew" hit a cable and a water pipe and took out all the Bell South (now AT&T) circuits feeding Sandy Springs North of 285 for 2 or 3 days around 2003. The crew simply packed up their stuff was gone in 15 minutes before the cops could get there and was never seen again.

* The FFA circuits I worked on had their own wiring blocks were clearly marked, and you physically covered them with cloth when you worked in that section. If you had to work on them for an upgrade (a multiplexer in this case) it took a month or two to get coordinated with the FAA to get the Atlanta tower to cover Charley Brown's (Fulton County Airport) traffic. You had only one hour between 3AM and 4AM to make move the circuits.
 
SnottyNose799 said:
Shouldn't the NOAA stations that repeat they're off the air actually be off the air?
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Static doesn't give anyone any information. The "off the air" loop tells people where to go for updated weather information should they need it.

I just checked and my local weather radio station is running one of these loops. Which allows me to explain why and for how long, via a press release from NWS Paducah, KY:
However, impacts will occur to the NOAA Weather Radio transmitters that are maintained by the NWS Paducah office and serve southeast MO, southern IL, western KY and southwest IN. Beginning around 8 AM on Monday June 9th, all of the NOAA Weather Radio broadcasts provided by the NWS Paducah office will go offline for the duration of this update. A listing of NOAA Weather Radio transmitters that are broadcast from the NWS Paducah office can be found online at Weather Forecast Office and Transmitters. NOAA Weather broadcasts are expected to return to service sometime on Wednesday June 11th.
Click to expand...

This is a system upgrade that is moving across the country, one office at a time, and has been in progress for several months now.
 
If you think the NOAA voice is strange, there's always the ATIS announcements used by pilots.
 
@Michi: It actually sounds very much like the old NOAA "perfect Paul" voice from the 90s.

I checked a streaming feed of ATIS from KORD (Chicago O'Hare) and they are still using that voice in 2025. :oops:
 
PTBoardOp93 said:
The voice hasn't been updated in 10 years.
Click to expand...
If they're resistant to change, perhaps they can take advantage of AI voice cloning and clone the current NOAA weather radio robo-voice -- but with all its pronunciation issues smoothed out by the AI so it finally sounds like a real human. Best of both worlds!

Well, except for in Kansas. In Kansas, all tornado warnings should be cloned in the voice of Judy Garland...
 


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