NOUS41 KWBC 021743 PNSWSH Service Change Notice 11-06 National Weather Service Headquarters Washington DC 1243 PM EST Wed Feb 2 2011 TO: Subscribers: - Family of Services - NOAA Weather Wire Service - Emergency Managers Weather Information Network - NOAAPORT - Other NWS partners and NWS employees FROM: Eli Jacks Chief, Fire and Public Weather Services Branch SUBJECT: Implementation of Improved Fire and Public Weather Coverage for Mississippi and Southeast Louisiana Effective May 31, 2011 Effective Tuesday, May 31, 2011, at 100 pm Central Daylight Time (CDT), 1800 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the NWS Weather Forecast Office (WFO) in New Orleans/Baton Rouge Louisiana (LIX) will reconfigure its current fire and public weather forecast zones for Tangipahoa (LAZ038) Parish in southeast Louisiana. This reconfiguration will provide better forecast services by splitting Tangipahoa Parish into two separate fire and public weather forecast zones for climatological, geographical and meteorological effects. The fire and public weather forecast zones for Tangipahoa Parish will be split in half to form Northern Tangipahoa (LAZ071) and Southern Tangipahoa (LAZ072). This split will account for tropical and coastal issues that do not impact Northern Tangipahoa Parish and winter weather issues that to not affect Southern Tangipahoa Parish. The fire and public zone changes require to take appropriate action to receive the new zone products using the Universal Generic Code (UGC) zone code format (Z) listed in Table 1. TABLE 1. New Fire and Public Zone Configuration Identifiers NEW FIRE/PUBLIC UGC (Z) EXISTING FIRE/PUBLIC UGC (Z) ZONE NAME ZONE Name --------------- ------ -------------------- ------ NORTHERN TANGIPAHOA LAZ071 TANGIPAHOA LAZ038 SOUTHERN TANGIPAHOA LAZ072 TANGIPAHOA LAZ038 More detail regarding this change (including greater detail regarding why these fire and public zone changes are being made), graphical depictions of the current and new fire and public zones, and a table of WFO LIX affected products are available online at: www.srh.weather.gov/LIX/?n=tangipahoa_breakup Updated fire and public weather forecast zone shapefiles are available online at: www.weather.gov/geodata/catalog/wsom/html/pubzone.htm and www.weather.gov/geodata/catalog/wsom/html/firezone.htm For more information, please contact: Ken Graham Melinda Bailey Meteorologist-in-Charge Public/Marine Meteorologist National Weather Service National Weather Service New Orleans/Baton Rouge Southern Region Headquarters Slidell LA 70460 Fort Worth TX 76102 504-522-7330/985-649-0357 817-978-1100 X107 ken.graham@noaa.gov melinda.bailey@noaa.gov National Service Change Notices are online at: http://www.weather.gov/os/notif.htm $$ NNNN