'Always Practicing'
- Madison Horton
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
Inside National Weather Service Norman
The National Weather Service in Norman is housed in a state-of-the-art facility called the National Weather Center on the University of Oklahoma’s campus.
NWS Norman’s Forecasting Office is next to the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed and the Storm Prediction Center.
The Hazardous Weather Testbed is where meteorologists from all around the world meet for a week to test new technology and ways to issue forecasts and warnings.
Inside the NWS office are plenty of computers and televisions. During severe weather, there is at least one person monitoring what TV stations are saying. During severe weather, it's often the storm spotters and TV crews who are closest to the action.
They watch for any possible new information they can get from the stations and to also provide any clarity to the stations if needed.
There are a minimum of two people working around the clock. People come in to work not only for forecasting, but also for training.
“We do that all the time. We're always practicing for the next event or learning from one that just happened,” NWS Warning Coordination Meteorologist Rick Smith said.
NWS Norman controls three Doppler radars: the Oklahoma City radar, the Fredrick radar and the Vance Air Force Base radar.
“So the radar will rotate around at a half a degree elevation, and then once it completes that it'll jump up to maybe 1.3 degrees or 2.4 degrees, until it does an entire vertical scan of the atmosphere," Smith said.
"We can use this unit to control how fast it does that, how many elevations it does, and if we wanted to do the lower levels faster because there's tornadoes,” he explained.
NWS Norman can also control some aspects of the OKC Will Rogers International Airport terminal Doppler radar.
Above the radar control center are about eight monitors all with different information on them. They have anything ranging from weather reports that are coming in, to information of possible wildfires.
In the office, they have multiple different forms of communication. They use anything from chatrooms to multiple different types of radio.
“I'd like to have redundant forms of communication because something's gonna break at some point,” Smith said.
Outside the main room, they have administrative offices and a dedicated training room. Inside the training room, there are multiple stations to sit down and go back through radar data from previous weather events.
It doesn’t just have to be tornado situations, it can also be fires or winter weather.
Down the hall from the training room, there’s a room that houses all the technical equipment.
“We have a whole staff of electronic technicians who keep the radars operating. We have 13 weather radio transmitters that we're responsible for being on the air," Smith said. "
"There's a whole network that covers almost the whole area, so our technicians fixed those, our computer systems and our observing systems at the airports,” he explained.
NWS Norman doesn’t only utilize the advanced technology they have, they also use the highly skilled meteorologists on staff.
Whether it’s four to six of them on an average day, or the full office on a severe weather day, all 56 counties the office oversees can count on them being prepared.
