Weather radio outage due to software updates to affect Chattanooga most of this week

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF)- Weather radios have become an essential lifeline to warn those in the path of severe weather.

However for the next few days, many in our area will not receive the warnings they are used to.

If you try to turn on your weather radio today in the Chattanooga area, here is what you hear.

 “This NOAA Weather Radio Station is temporarily off the air. Please tune to an alternate radio broadcast or visit weather.gov for the latest information.”

This outage is not sudden, but a planned one.

The WXK48 transmitter is one of four stations operated by NWS Morristown.

It is located in Walden, and on Tuesday was shrouded in fog and rain.

Internal software upgrades required by NOAA have forced these transmitters to temporarily go off of the air.

NWS Morristown’s lead Warning Coordination Meteorologist, Anthony Cavallucci, said, “There’s some security updates going on that require our main computers to be offline, and the updates are more internal than external.”

Every single NWS office has to do these upgrades, as they were scheduled months ago.

Cavallucci said, “This was probably made last fall, this schedule, and it’s a pretty hard date, so, we can’t pause it to wait for severe weather for example.”

Cavallucci says that NWS Morristown will continue to forecast and issue weather warnings as needed, with help from other NWS offices.

One way to get weather alerts while weather radios are unavailable is to go to your phone, go to your settings, to your notifications, go all the way down to the bottom, and then, you’ll see several options for government alerts.

There are other ways of getting warnings the NWS says you should have anyway as backups.

Cavallucci said, “Phone apps that provide alerting information is available, your county emergency management may have a warning notification system that you could sign up for, that’s always a good option, and local television, you guys probably also have an app that will alert people as well.”

Remember that ultimately, weather radios are the most reliable form of warnings.

News 12’s Chip Chapman says, “What happens if your cell tower is knocked down by a tornado? You don’t have to worry about that with a weather alert radio.”

News 12’s weather app is called WDEF News 12 Weather and is available on all app stores.

NWS Morristown expects these upgrades to be complete and service returned to normal by Friday morning at the latest.