What is PCA?

In addition to whole county alerting some NWS offices are looking to sub-divide the County by what we call Partial County Alerting (PCA). This will be most noticeable via alerts issued with the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and NOAA Weather Radio (NWR). Alerting via EAS and NWR are based on the Federal Information Processing Series (FIPS) and Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME), which tells the alert where to go.

If PCA is adopted, in addition to the entire County alerting, residents will be separated into distinct geographical areas. This will be annotated by the leading digit of the SAME code. The SAME code is the FIPS codes plus a digit at the beginning. FIPS for Boulder County is 08013 with the SAME code being 008013. FIPS codes that are Partial County Alerting will change the first zero (0) to a digit between one (1) and nine (9). See the maps linked on this page to find out what the leading digit changes to for your city, x08013, where x is a number between 1-9.

PCA Explanation

To provide your comments, please email:
Warning Coordination Meteorologist - Greg Heavener
E-mail: Greg Heavener

What We're Proposing

NWS Weather Forecast Office (WFO) Boulder, CO, is proposing a change in the dissemination of warnings via NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards (NWR) and the Emergency Alert System (EAS) for Boulder County, Colorado. This change would target the delivery of weather warnings to populations to a more targeted threat area and minimize or eliminate unnecessary delivery of weather and water warnings to residents located far from the threat area.

WFO Boulder has coordinated with Boulder County Emergency Managers and Communicatons, the Colorado State Emergency Communications Committee, broadcasters, state and local government officials, EAS encoder/decoder manufacturers, and NWR receiver manufacturers.

• Current SAME Location Code for Boulder County: 008013


• Proposed SAME Location Codes
• Northwest Boulder: 108013
• Northeast Boulder: 308013
• Southwest Boulder: 708013
• Southeast Boulder: 908013

NWR listeners who wish to continue receiving SAME weather alerts for all Boulder county partitions should make no changes and continue using SAME Code 008013

NWR listeners who wish to receive SAME weather alerts specific to their local area should add the appropriate, partition-specific SAME Code and delete SAME Code 008013.

Note that if WFO Boulder issues a weather alert applicable to the entire county, you will continue to receive these alerts. You will also continue to receive all Civil Emergency Messages issued for Boulder County.

Proposed Boulder Partitions

To provide your comments, please email:
Warning Coordination Meteorologist - Greg Heavener
E-mail: Greg Heavener

NOAA Weather Radio

NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards (NWR) uses Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) when the following warnings are issued by WFO Boulder:

• Dust Storm Warning (DSW)
• Flash Flood Warning (FFW)
• Severe Thunderstorm Warning (SVR)
• Snow Squall Warning (SQW)
• Tornado Warning (TOR)

Although NWS meteorologists specify latitude and longitude points (i.e., polygons) to identify the threat area, the warnings from Boulder County are currently conveyed via NWR and the Emergency Alert System (EAS) to the whole county. This means that even if a very small part of Boulder County is included in a warning, all of Boulder County receives the warning via SAME. Because of Boulder County's complex terrain and population bases spread across much of the eastern edge of the county, residents are unnecessarily receiving EAS and NWR notifications for warnings in areas located more than 30 miles from the actual threat area.

To address the issue of SAME and EAS over alerting for large counties when only a portion of the county is, in fact, affected, five WFOs (Duluth, Glasgow, Rapid City, Tucson, and Las Vegas) assigned partial county NWR and EAS codes to sections of large counties within their area of responsibility.  This partitioning has worked very well for them for many years. By using the SAME partial county location codes, these WFOs have successfully issued warnings for predefined parts of a county, which substantially reduces the “False Alarm Area” and “listener fatigue” via NWR and EAS.

To provide your comments, please email:
Warning Coordination Meteorologist - Greg Heavener
E-mail: Greg Heavener

Additional Information

• Find Your New SAME Code using your address
• PCA fact sheet
• 5 Weather Forecast Offices Using PCA
• Programming Your NWR Receiver: Q&A
• SAME Location Codes for Counties
• SAME Location Code Information for Using PCA
• Information fore Broadcasters
• Reference: see how our friends in Clark County, NV implemented PCA

To provide your comments, please email:
Warning Coordination Meteorologist - Greg Heavener
E-mail: Greg Heavener