CONTENTS:
What Is EMWIN?
EMWIN stands for the
Emergency Managers Weather Information Network. It is a
weather information datastream that provides free emergency weather information
and other related data. In 1995 the
National Weather Service
recognized the need to provide the emergency management community with access
to a set of NWS warnings, watches, forecasts, and other
products at no recurring cost. The datastream is
distributed through three methods -- Internet, satellite, and VHF broadcast.
Funding, volunteer work, and/or technical assistance for EMWIN is provided
by the National Weather Service, the
Federal Emergency Management Agency,
and other public and private organizations.
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What Does THIS System Do?
Our system works exactly like the Alachua County Office of Emergency Management's EMWIN system. It is the exact same equipment, in fact. The
ACOEM has their system set up and running now in the Alachua County Combined Communications & Emergency Operations Center
(see map). However, ACOEM's system is
used mostly "in-house". They output their info to a couple of ACOEM-run lists
and local in-house servers and such. They have the ability to serve a
much wider audience such as the general public just as we're doing, but it was
decided by ACOEM that to do so would take too much time, effort, resources, and
money; so when they were offered a secondary EMWIN system by FDEM they refused it.
Ken Allen, then the Asst. Emergency Manager (now the Emergency Manager for UF EM),
in an email, notified Todd Sherman of the existence of the spare system and asked
if Alachua County SKYWARN® would like to take control of it. John
Fleming, of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, then personally delivered
the ground station equipment to Mr. Sherman's doorstep and, with a quick signature
acknowledging receipt and ownership, it then became the property of Alachua County
SKYWARN. Work was begun immediately to arrange permission from the University of
Florida and its Physical Plant Division to allow initial placement atop the Dental
Science Building at Shands at the University of Florida, where the station resided
for a number of years. Unfortunately, after the server system was hacked by a Gator
Amateur Radio Club member, and a subsequent criminal investigation was severely
snafoo'd by UPD investigators, the equipment was removed to another much safer
location. [see note]
![[Pager Example]](advisor-tor.gif)
our system does much the same thing as the EOC EMWIN system; however, we cater
to the general public - at no cost, as a public service.
We can send products out to your cellphone or text pager, as well as to your
e-mail Inbox. We're also FTPing products to our own AC-EMWIN web site, and a
watch/warning map to the Alachua County SKYWARN main
page. (If you like, we can even FTP the watch/warning map to your OWN web
site!)
Bulletin users past and present include agencies such as Gainesville Fire &
Rescue, various emergency management agency personnel (locally and
in surrounding counties), UF teachers, staff, and employees, security systems
agencies, NAVSTA Mayport, Keystone Heights Fire Department workers, Press corps
personnel, alarm system companies (to alert their admin of weather which could
affect other divisions), various other companies - including security systems
businesses (for admin personnel notifications only, and not used in a manner for
profit), various email lists (AC-SKYWARN Email Alert List, ACEMWIN-HURR-L Hurricane
Bulletins List, the SKYWARN-L list, the ACWIN-* series of listgroups, for some
examples), and also to Twitter pages such as the
AC-EMWIN Twitter site and
the ACWIN-KGNV METARs site.
Ownership of the AC-EMWIN system was transferred to Todd Sherman, Founder
and Project Manager of the Alachua County EMWIN Project by John Fleming of
the Florida Division of Emergency
Management in 2002. Other groups and organizations also helped with the
initial setup of the Project in various ways.
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Who Can Use This System? and How?
Why us when there are so many other commercially-run internet services
out there offering weather bulletins, too? Well, you'll find that of the
commercial internet services available, if you want bulletins for FREE, they
come with all sorts of caveats and limitations. ...You can only get one free
bulletin per subscriber. ...You can only get a message sent to one county per
subscriber. Things like this. What if you want more than one type of
weather bulletin? What if they don't carry the bulletin that you want?
What if you want a bulletin to cover multiple counties at once? With AC-EMWIN,
you can have all of that. All you have to do is tell us what you want, and we
can give it to you: one bulletin or more; one county or multiple counties; all
day, or only during a certain PART of the day; the full bulletin, or in
abbreviated form for pagers and things with limited character space allotments.
We can do anything you need, and we can do it...FOR FREE.
We take bulletin dissemination seriously. We're not trying to make a profit
off it. We're here to serve the public. That's our main mission.
And we're entrenched. As we've said, we've been doing this for the local area
(and some surrounding areas, too)
Anyone can use the AC-EMWIN data. For the email and/or text paging
services, just let us know which products you're interested in and where
you'd like them sent and we can set you up to receive them right away. If
you would like us to do so, see Receiving Emails &
Pages, or just send us an e-mail at
acemwin@alachuaskywarn.org.
To help you decide which products you want, please see our
Text Products list.
We also have a number of updated Graphical
Products available for viewing only. We are unable to e-mail the
graphics to anyone, unfortunately.
NOTE: Users should recognize that while this system is a great
convenience, it should NOT be considered as a replacement for the
NOAA Weather Radio. That being said, it makes a darned awesome
additional service!
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Need Help Incorporating!
So far, all operational and maintenance costs have been assumed by the
Project Founder and Manager, Todd Sherman. However, upgrades are needed to
make the system better by bringing the system up-to-date with current
technology. For example, the GOES satellites have been upgraded to handle
much higher data downlink speeds (19Kbaud, as compared to our current downlink
speed of 9600 baud from an older satellite that will eventually be switched
out). To receive the faster downlink data we need a special software-driven
demodulator. We also need feedline for the satellite dish, and someone to set
up the ground station equipment and to properly align it. We'd also like to
provide system redundancy with duplicate satellite ground station and server
equipment, and to provide backup power during longer term outages. This is
currently far beyond our funding capability, alone. It would be nice to be
able to accept grants and donations, and to be able to offer those who donate a
Tax ID to use to get tax credit. If you are a lawyer and you would like to
offer help in getting us set up, please contact Todd Sherman at
acemwin-funding@alachuaskywarn.org.
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