First of all, I'm not an insider, I'm just a weather nerd who came across this story awhile back and was really curious about it so I did some research.
That said, my understanding is that they are basically going towards a widespread mixed-mode setup now, but they haven't yet for historical and budgetary reasons.
The system they'll be replacing is largely the result of tragedies like the Andrea Doria and countless less famous weather-related accidents that were caused by faulty communication of important weather bulletins. Because of this there was a pretty significant investment in designing and deploying a really robust system, and it was rolled out extremely widely, including far flung and remote weather stations, and was adopted elsewhere as a standard as well.
Fast forward to today and the aging system does the job but is in a rather precarious state because everyone who designed and built it is long dead, and in the face of shrinking budgets, like the NYC subway system and the national air traffic control systems, for most of its history it was maintained just enough to keep pace but rarely upgraded.
Only relatively recently has there been momentum behind modernization and the big driver behind that has been the increasingly deadly tornado seasons we've been experiencing over the past decade or so. The need to be able to push out more geographically precise bulletins as well as to make them more impactful (they recently started using phrases like "you will die if you do not seek shelter" in select tornado alley locations) in the hope of decreasing casualties has been a major driver behind this change.
That said, my understanding is that they are basically going towards a widespread mixed-mode setup now, but they haven't yet for historical and budgetary reasons.
The system they'll be replacing is largely the result of tragedies like the Andrea Doria and countless less famous weather-related accidents that were caused by faulty communication of important weather bulletins. Because of this there was a pretty significant investment in designing and deploying a really robust system, and it was rolled out extremely widely, including far flung and remote weather stations, and was adopted elsewhere as a standard as well.
Fast forward to today and the aging system does the job but is in a rather precarious state because everyone who designed and built it is long dead, and in the face of shrinking budgets, like the NYC subway system and the national air traffic control systems, for most of its history it was maintained just enough to keep pace but rarely upgraded.
Only relatively recently has there been momentum behind modernization and the big driver behind that has been the increasingly deadly tornado seasons we've been experiencing over the past decade or so. The need to be able to push out more geographically precise bulletins as well as to make them more impactful (they recently started using phrases like "you will die if you do not seek shelter" in select tornado alley locations) in the hope of decreasing casualties has been a major driver behind this change.