CHARLOTTE, N.C. — This winter, changes are coming to the cold-weather alerts issued by the National Weather Service.
The NWS has been working on hazard simplification for the last few years. Now, they’re consolidating and changing some of their cold-weather communication.
Some of the most notable for the Charlotte area:
- Freeze Watches, Freeze Warnings, Hard Freeze Watch and Hard Freeze Warnings will be simplified to either a Freeze Watch or Freeze Warning.
- Wind Chill Watches and Warnings will become Extreme Cold Watches and Extreme Cold Warnings.
- Wind Chill Advisories will become Cold Weather Advisories.
RAISE YOUR WEATHER IQ: A "watch" means particular weather is possible while a "warning" means it is occuring
Trisha Palmer, the Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the NWS in Greenville-Spartanburg, said these changes help with messaging and reduce the overall number of alerts-types they issue.
There will also be changes to some of the cold weather criteria.
Palmer said the main difference for Charlotte is related to what was previously known as the Wind Chill Advisory. In the new Cold Weather Advisory, they have warmed the temperature in which to issue them. It used to be zero degrees and now it'll be ten degrees. This is due to public health impacts pinpointed closer to ten degrees, according to Palmer.
This changes impact the weather alerts you see on television and your phone. These changes from the NWS mean you may see them issued more often.
For the North Carolina foothills, the threshold for a Cold Weather Advisory has increased by five degrees with no change for the state's mountainous communities
However, the mountains will see a change to Extreme Cold Warnings, as the criteria have increased to 15 degrees below zero compared to the 20 degrees below zero previously used for Wind Chill Warnings.
The change in vocabulary means the National Weather Service can issue these alerts for impacts from the actual air temperature and not just the calculated wind chill, which uses a combination of both air temperature and wind speed to calculate a temperature.
Contact Brittany Van Voorhees at bvanvoorhe@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, X and Instagram.
