Office Tour

Welcome to the virtual tour of the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Charleston, South Carolina, which is located at the Charleston International Airport/Air Force Base. We are staffed by meteorologists 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year to serve the people of southern South Carolina and southeast Georgia. Check out a little of what we do by taking a virtual look inside our operations. Just click on the links below or scroll down the page.

Entrance Area | Operations Area | NOAA Weather Radio | Conference Room | Cubicles | Computer Room | Upper-air Inflation Building | Radar

This is the entrance area to our office where our Administrative Assistant will greet you!

The operations area (left) is where all of the forecasts and severe weather warnings are produced and sent out to our customers. Normally, only 2 or 3 forecasters will be on shift at once, as well as either a meteorological intern or hydrometeorological technician. However, more staff is needed during severe weather operations, including hurricanes. There are 6 Advanced Weather Information Processing System (AWIPS) workstations (right) available to the staff.

The NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards (NWR) Console Replacement System (CRS) converts our text products, including forecasts, severe weather warnings, and even civil emergency messages into voice format so that they can be broadcast over 5 transmitters located within our office's County Warning Area. Click here to find out more about NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards!

The conference room is used for various purposes including meetings and training.

The cubicle area is used for training and research projects.

The computer room houses all of the systems designed to obtain and transmit vast amounts of meteorologic/hydrologic data. This room is climate-controlled in order to maintain a constant relative humidity which is vital to the longevity of the computer systems.

The upper-air inflation building is where we prepare and release weather balloons twice a day. The data collected from these balloons gets incorporated into the National Weather Service computer models that help us produce our forecasts. Click here to check out the latest upper-air sounding from Charleston, SC as well as other soundings from across the U.S.!

Our doppler radar is not co-located with our office but rather about 75 miles to the west-southwest in Grays, South Carolina. This position is more centralized across our forecast area. The radar provides crucial information about not only where precipitation is falling but also in which direction the precipitation is moving, which is vital in warning for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. Find out more about our radar on our Science/Technology webpage. For the latest real-time radar imagery, click here.