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.

PCA for Boulder County has been adopted meaning, in addition to the entire County alerting, residents have now been separated into four distinct geographical areas. This has been 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

What Are The Changes

NWS Weather Forecast Office (WFO) Boulder, CO, has changed the dissemination of warnings via NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards (NWR) and the Emergency Alert System (EAS) for Boulder County, Colorado. This change targets 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 worked extensively 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 to implement these changes.

• Current SAME Location Code for All of Boulder County: 008013


• New Paritioned SAME Location Codes

• Northwest Boulder: 108013
• Northeast Boulder: 308013
• Southwest Boulder: 708013
• Southeast Boulder: 908013

See map below for a more detailed, interactive sampling of cities and their associated FIPs code.

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.

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)

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