Contact Information
Address:
62300 Airport Road
Slidell, LA 70460-5243
United StatesEmail:
Website:
Twitter Account:
Office Hours:
6am to 10pm daily
Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center (RFC)
The Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center is in Slidell, LA (about 30 miles northeast of New Orleans), co-located with the New Orleans Weather Forecast Office. Our office is open seven days a week, 365 days a year, from 6am to 10pm, and is prepared to go 24 hours a day when necessary. We provide daily river forecasts on the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries. This comprises over 200 sites in a 210, 000 square mile area throughout the southeast US.
The Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center was founded in 1971 in concert with the efforts to fund the Alaska River Forecast Center, and officially commenced operations in January of 1972. No single flood event can be identified as motivating the formation of this RFC. Instead, its startup resulted from the need to complete the coverage of the Nation by RFCs and to provide coordinated forecasts for the economically critical lower Mississippi basin. Since it commenced operation, the LMRFC responsibility area of over 209,000 square miles has essentially remained unchanged. After it was formed, the LMRFC was the first to demonstrate the routine use of the nationally-supported operational forecast system which would eventually become the NWS River Forecast System (NWSRFS).