A NOAA weather radio at the Green Bay NWS office on May 15, 2025. PC: Fox 11 Online
UPDATE: NOAA weather radio service was restored shortly after 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, just before severe weather reached the area.
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GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — A technology upgrade happening at the National Weather Service office in Green Bay means weather radios in the central and northeast portions of the state are temporarily out of service with severe weather expected tonight.
“Our entire IT system is being upgraded, so it’s not just NOAA weather radios, it’s everything we use for forecasts and disseminate the warnings, so right now we have our weather service office in Milwaukee that is backing us up, issuing some of the forecast products,” says Kurt Kotenberg, a meteorologist at the Green Bay office.
The system upgrade began on Tuesday morning, meaning that the forecast tools at the office, along with NOAA weather radios, have been out of service since then.
“Every single office in the whole country is doing this upgrade over the course of the next few weeks, and this week just happened to be our station’s upgrade and unfortunately, we have severe weather at the very tail end of it,” Kotenberg adds.
“The good news is that everything with our upgrade is progressing on schedule, so we’re hopeful and optimistic that the NOAA weather radios will be active by the time the severe weather starts this afternoon in central Wisconsin.”
As tech teams work to get the Green Bay office back online, Kotenberg adds an important reminder for the community.
“A big takeaway with this, [with] the weather radios being down now, I think this is a really good chance to remind everyone to have multiple ways to receive warnings. So the NOAA weather radio is just one way, whether it’s cell phone, internet, local television station, radio, having multiple ways to receive warnings is the best thing you can do to keep yourself and your family safe.”
As of 1:15 p.m. Thursday, the NOAA radios are still down. Instead of announcing weather updates, it’s repeating the local time.
“So right now, all of our forecast products are not in the NOAA weather radio, but once our system upgrade finishes, which will hopefully be later this morning, early this afternoon, we’ll start to get everything flowing again and then things like warnings, forecast updates will be streamed through the radio as it normally would,” Kotenberg says.
Kotenberg says the upgrades are back-end maintenance, ensuring that advances in technology are properly integrated into their systems to make sure things work quickly and efficiently.
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