NEW Cold Weather Products Effective October 1 2024

On October 1, 2024, the National Weather Service will simplify the cold weather products across the entire country. Below is additional information on the change for our local area.

There are three main changes:

1 - Removing the Hard Freeze Warning Product.

2 - Changing Wind Chill Advisory, Watch and Warning to Extreme Cold

3 - Changing the thresholds/criteria that we use to issue these products.

See below for a Service Change Notice on this change:

Service Change Notice 23-44

See below for a National fact sheet on this simplification.

Hazard Simplification Fact Sheet

These thresholds are for our local LIX County Warning Area, as seen in the map below the table.

The new thresholds for temperature and wind chills are in "tiers" from coldest in the north to warmest in the CONUS. You can see those tiers below.

These are based on climatology and what temperatures impact the local area.

ECW = Extreme Cold Warning

CWY = Cold Weather Advisory

*NOTE- These are NOT the colors of the products on the Watch/Warning/Advisory map. They are simply picked to show the various tiers of thresholds easily.

For areas along the Mississippi Coast and along and South of 1-10 (dark pink):

A Cold Weather Advisory would be issued when Temperatures OR Wind Chills are expected to fall below 25 degrees F.

An Extreme Cold Warning would be issue when Temperatures OR Wind Chills are expected to fall below 15 degrees F.

A Freeze Warning will be issued every time the temperature is 32 or below. We will not overlap a Freeze Warning and Cold Advisory.

For areas north of that (light pink):

A Cold Weather Advisory would be issued when Temperatures OR Wind Chills are expected to fall below 20 degrees F.

An Extreme Cold Warning would be issue when Temperatures OR Wind Chills are expected to fall below 10 degrees F.

A Freeze Warning will only be issued for the first two freezes of the season, or after an unseasonably warm spell.

Here are examples of what a cold event may look like with the new products compared to our legacy products.

For any questions, comments, concerns or feedback, please contact:

Lauren Nash

Lauren.Nash@noaa.gov

Warning Coordination Meteorologist