JEFFERSON, Wis. — The warning is out, the sirens sound, and you get an alert on your phone. It's a tornado warning, you know what to do.
But that warning didn't originate from TMJ4. We received the same one. Once we do, we'd get on the air - like we did on October 12 of last year.
"The Milwaukee National Weather Service office, we cover from the Dells to Sheboygan down to the Illinois border and we're responsible for those counties," said Tim Halbach, the Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the National Weather Service. "Depending on how busy or how bad the severe weather looks, we'll either have four or five people taking each one of the workstations".
24/7, 365 days a year: the meteorologists here are always watching the weather.
"People just don't know that we're real people," Halbach says. "Everyone, when they hear the National Weather Service, they think of the computer-robot voice on the weather radio."
Each warning is made by a forecaster in this office.
"We can follow along with where the storm goes and we can adjust the path of where we think the warning needs to be".
Meteorologists in this office are doing everything by hand, clicking buttons, and manually making changes.
"Yeah, it's manually done. Someone has to physically do this," Halbach said.
They even let me give it a try.
Tim said, "If we did a tornado warning for Milwaukee...I hit send and it goes out on weather radio, wireless emergency alerts, and apps; on the news, the crawl will kick in."
Once there is a warning, communication is key.
"We can talk with all the county dispatch centers with these two radios too," said Halbach.
The reports are crucial.
"People typically look for confirmation. They want to know that risk is for them and that it's legit... We have this chat with the TV meteorologists and that's where, quickly, if it's something that's changing rapidly, we can drop a note to say something like 'Hey these warnings are legit."
And those notes, what they were seeing on radar or reports from law enforcement, let us meteorologists help you get to safety.
"We're local. We're part of Southern Wisconsin," said Halbach.
The National Weather Service will begin using the office messaging service Slack to communicate with emergency managers and broadcasters. It's expected to roll out summer of 2023.
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