Photo's

I had the chance to visit the new National Weather Center located in Norman, Oklahoma on March 1, 2007 at the National Severe Weather Workshop.  This is a new center that houses many important agencies for NOAA.  In the past these agencies were in separate building and could not share information easily like they can now.

 

This build is really state of the art and very well protected from Tornadoes and severe weather.  All the walls of the building are lined with Kevlar (bullet proof vests) and all the glass in the building is bullet proof or high impact glass. Basically the building is designed to withstand a direct hit from a large tornado or severe weather event.  They do have a basement also but most of the place is very safe to be in when the weather gets bad.

 

There are four separate power feeds into the building all redundant from failure along with all the communications and networking. 

 

The building houses the following NOAA Agencies:

	Storm Prediction Center
	National Weather Service Norman Weather Forecast Office (WFO)
	National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL)
	Radar Operations Center
	Warning Decision Training Branch

 

University of Oklahoma Academic Departments:

	College of Atmospheric & Geographical Sciences
	College of Engineering
	School of Meteorology
	School of Electrical & Computer Engineering

 

It has 255 thousand square feet of office space which about half is used by the NOAA agencies listed above.  This is really an amazing building with a lot of high tech equipment. 

The National Weather Service Weather Forecasting (WFO) office for the region is also located in the National Weather Center. As you can see there are many large monitors, some of them watch the national and local TV stations to see what is being reported and other monitors for radar and satellite images.  Each forecaster there has many monitors that show different pieces of information to help them in forecasting severe weather.