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Powerful Pacific System Impacting the West; First Significant Snow for Portions of the East

Power Pacific system will continue to bring significant impacts for Pacific Northwest into northern California the remainder of the week. Dangerous coastal affects, heavy rain, flooding, strong winds, and higher elevation mountain snow continues. Meanwhile, a storm across the east is set to bring the first accumulating snow to many higher elevations of the Catskills into the central Appalachians. Read More >

Overview

 

Effective October 29th, 2020, the National Weather Service forecast office in Aberdeen, SD (ABR) will modify fire weather zone boundaries across central and northeast South Dakota.  The purpose of this change is to better meet the needs of fire partners and improve fire weather support, including improved watch, warning, and forecast products.  The new fire weather forecast zone boundaries will align with county boundaries.  These changes were necessary to create more detailed fire weather forecasts by reducing the size of the fire zones and resultant forecast area.

The change in fire zone boundaries will require new fire weather zone numbers.  Details of these zone number changes are listed in the table below:

Current Fire Zone Numbers Future Fire Zone Numbers (October 29, 2020)
   
SDZ267 - Lower Bad River SDZ003 - Corson
SDZ268 - Upper Cheyenne SDZ004 - Campbell
SDZ269 - Upper Missouri Coteau SDZ005 - McPherson
SDZ270 - Missouri Coteau SDZ006 - Brown
SDZ271 - Upper James River SDZ007 - Marshall
SDZ272 - Prairie Coteau SDZ008 - Roberts
SDZ273 - Red River Valley SDZ009 - Walworth
  SDZ010 - Edmunds
  SDZ011 - Day
  SDZ015 - Dewey
  SDZ016 - Potter
  SDZ017 - Faulk
  SDZ018 - Spink
  SDZ019 - Clark
  SDZ020 - Codington
  SDZ021 - Grant
  SDZ022 - Hamlin
  SDZ023 - Deuel
  SDZ033 - Stanley
  SDZ034 - Sully
  SDZ035 - Hughes
  SDZ036 - Hyde
  SDZ037 - Hand
  SDZ045 - Jones
  SDZ048 - Lyman
  SDZ051 - Buffalo

 

Maps

 

Graphical descriptions of the old and new fire weather zones are available below:

 

Current Fire Weather Zones

 

Future Fire Weather Zones on October 29, 2020

 

Text Products

 

NWS watch, warning, and forecast products affected by these changes are:

NWS Aberdeen Products WMO Heading AWIPS ID
Fire Weather Watch WWUS83 KABR RFWABR
Red Flag Warning WWUS83 KABR RFWABR
Fire Weather Planning Forecast FNUS53 KABR FWFABR

 

NWS partners and users will need to make necessary changes to their communications systems to accommodate these fire weather forecast zone changes.  A shapefile of the new fire weather forecast zones for NWS ABR is online at:  http://www.nws.noaa.gov/geodata/catalog/wsom/html/firezone.htm

For more information, please contact:

Travis Tarver - Fire Weather Program Manager

824 Brown County 14 S.

Aberdeen, SD  57401

605-290-0292

travis.tarver@noaa.gov

 

National Service Change Notices are online at:  http://www.weather.gov/os/notif.htm

Service Chance Notice issued Wednesday, August 12, 2020