Cold Weather Turnkey (Oct 2024)

In Oct 2024, the NWS is consolidating:

  • the hard freeze watch/warning into the existing freeze watch/warning
  • the wind chill watch/warning into the existing extreme cold watch/warning
  • wind chill advisory into the new cold weather advisory

 For more information on this change see:

A turnkey is being deployed in Sep 2024 to support the GFE and Hazard Services changes required. After the turnkey is run, all the consolidated products are now located in the Hazard Services Non-Precipitation category in the HID, and the wind chill products are removed from the Winter Weather category:

For a comparison of before and after Non-Precipitation and Winter Weather categories see these images: NPW, winter.

The workflow for issuing these products has not changed significantly. The Cold Weather Advisory has a couple of small changes worth noting. The first is the Temperature/Wind radio button toggle for the "Reason for the cold hazard:" will provide the What: bullet with "Very cold temperatures" or "Very cold wind chills":

The grid sampling for the What: bullet which feeds the Impacts Bullet uses the ApparentT GFE element.

There is an extra grid sampling capability in the Impacts: section for CW.Y/EC.A/EC.W that was released in an Oct 2024 patch. In the above image, the Impacts: section of the Wind reason in the HID will include "Automatically Generated Impacts (derived from grids)". If the ApparentT sampling matches certain thresholds (configurable), the grid sampling will appear in the Impacts Bullet: