Hennepin County begins partial alerting next week. Here's what that means.
Severe weather season is right around the corner and the National Weather Service (NWS) is improving how warnings are relayed here in Hennepin County.
Ask any meteorologist and they'll tell you NOAA weather radios are lifesavers when severe weather rolls around. Starting March 18, their warnings are getting even more specific thanks to what's called partial warning alerts.
"If you're, let's say, in Bloomington and the tornado is up in Rogers, you don't want that weather radio sounding off. You only want it if the storm is going to directly impact your area," Todd Krause, Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the NWS Twin Cities office, said.
Instead of the whole county being alerted, there are now six smaller zones that will only be notified if a warning is issued in that area.
"If people want to only be alerted for exactly where they live, then they need to reprogram their radios and add a certain digit. If somebody doesn't change their weather radio at all, they're still going to get their warnings," Krause said.
He added that other larger counties around Duluth already have the technology, but Hennepin County is the first in the metro to request the change because of the population spread across the county.
He said this won't change how the alerts reach your phone, or impact tornado sirens — only the weather radios. If you don't have a weather radio, Krasue said, they're worth it.
"A lot of people will just think, well, my cell phone is good enough, but it's not," he said. "Sometimes technology fails, sometimes the cell tower might not send that signal, and so on. So you always want to have more than one way of getting a warning."
For more on the changes and help reprogramming your radio, click here.
