The Oklahoma City Life Members Affinity Group (LMAG) toured the National Weather Center in October 2025. University of Oklahoma meteorology student Brooke Gaines explained the organization’s structure, pointed out the main building features, showed the primary equipment (sensing devices, hail/storm measurement vehicles, and portable radar trucks), and let us see the 360-degree views from the rooftop observation deck.
The National Weather Center comprises multiple agencies at the federal, state, and local levels, as well as academic institutions and research and development partners. These organizations work together in partnership to improve understanding of events occurring in the Earth’s atmosphere over a wide range of time and space scales.
The NWC houses approximately 550 people, including research scientists, operational meteorologists and climatologists, engineers, technicians, support staff, and graduate and undergraduate students. The NWC is 244,000 square feet and costs US$69 million. The building’s server room is 1,400 square feet and holds 1,720 servers. The NWC has five floors (and a sixth-floor Observation Deck), but it’s actually about nine stories high. This is because so much extra space was needed in between floors to house the 3,200 miles of cabling.
