NOAA weather station malfunction

[luke]

In Feb. 2005, a malfunction occurred at KIB98, the NOAA WX station in Portland, OR.

Basically, someone inadvertently entered the speech synthesis program's programming code in an audio format, and this was the result:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc7HX7BSkjI

[Smjh1979]

I haven't heard anything like that before!

I've personally heard two abnormalities on Weather Radio in the past. I posted one of these back on the old forum, but since the crash, I never put it back. I'll do so now.

Back sometime around 1996-1999 before the weather radios were done with computerized voices, real people would say the weather data needed.

One such "blooper" was during an extended forecast. The first part went through just fine. When they got to the temperatures, things got weird...

They said something along the lines of "Low temperatures will range....." (Insert 45 seconds of silence) "Low temperatures range from an unknown number". Another recording was done by ad different voice to try to fix this mistake, but ended up making the same thing. "Low temperatures for the extended forecast range....(insert 5 seconds of silence) from an unknown number". It was never fixed until it was time to update the forecast again, when everything worked fine.

The second such event happened sometime around 2008, probably during the monsoon season (which is pretty much the only time I have the weather radio out. During the winter, it gets put away, since rarely any severe weather happens during the winter months).

Anyways, the weather goes off and says "UNKNOWN STATEMENT, TUNE TV". I was right next to the weather radio, and heard it go off. I stayed right next to it to hear it turn on by itself. What I heard was the NOAA EAS tones going crazy. Normally, when you hear one on TV or radio, each "tone" in a series of 3 normally lasts 2 seconds for each tone. The ones I heard were 45 seconds for each tone! The closing tones were the same. Afterwards, the station resumed as normal.

I talked to Owensri about this, and he said that he's heard this before, and that the NWS accidentally set off an alert for EVERY type of advisory, statement, watch, and warning that exists in their weather radio database. That's why the tones were 45 seconds long, instead of 2 seconds. So it seemed as though they set off at least 27 if not more, different types of warnings, watches, advisories, and statements at once.

[luke]

The second such event happened sometime around 2008, probably during the monsoon season (which is pretty much the only time I have the weather radio out. During the winter, it gets put away, since rarely any severe weather happens during the winter months).

Anyways, the weather goes off and says "UNKNOWN STATEMENT, TUNE TV". I was right next to the weather radio, and heard it go off. I stayed right next to it to hear it turn on by itself. What I heard was the NOAA EAS tones going crazy. Normally, when you hear one on TV or radio, each "tone" in a series of 3 normally lasts 2 seconds for each tone. The ones I heard were 45 seconds for each tone! The closing tones were the same. Afterwards, the station resumed as normal.

I talked to Owensri about this, and he said that he's heard this before, and that the NWS accidentally set off an alert for EVERY type of advisory, statement, watch, and warning that exists in their weather radio database. That's why the tones were 45 seconds long, instead of 2 seconds. So it seemed as though they set off at least 27 if not more, different types of warnings, watches, advisories, and statements at once.

Whoops!

I BTW, listen to weather radio with the radios that I normally use for railfanning purposes.
They are immediately above where the railroads do their thing.