National Weather Service Chicago
NWS Forecast Office serving Chicago, northeast Illinois & far northwest Indiana
National Weather Service Chicago, currently based in Romeoville, Illinois, at Lewis University, is a weather forecast office responsible for monitoring weather conditions for 23 counties in Northern Illinois, the Chicago metropolitan area and Northwest Indiana. The Army Signal Service established the first federal weather office in the region in Chicago on October 15, 1870. During May 1894 the Chicago Weather Bureau was given a new forecast area extending from the Great Lakes region all the way to the Rocky Mountains. The current National Weather Service Chicago is located in Romeoville and is in charge of issuing local forecasts and weather warnings for the Chicago area. It is one of only two National Weather Service offices in Illinois, the other being National Weather Service Central Illinois in Lincoln, Illinois. The National Weather Service Chicago forecast office is located adjacent to the Lewis University Airport in Romeoville, Illinois.
NOAA Weather Radio
National Weather Service Chicago Forecast Office in Romeoville, Illinois, currently provides programming for 11 NOAA Weather Radio stations.
KWO39 Chicago
KWO39 regular programming serves marine interests on southern Lake Michigan and the Illinois and Indiana lake-shore. KWO39 also carries severe weather watches and warnings for Cook, DuPage, and Lake counties in Illinois, plus Lake and Porter counties in Indiana.
History
This station first began in 1954 as the first weather radio system in the Chicago area dedicated to the aviation user and continued until 1958 when the aviation broadcast went dark.
The public source identifies “National Weather Service Chicago” as nWS Forecast Office serving Chicago, northeast Illinois & far northwest Indiana. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around National, Weather and Service.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6979380. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1870, 1894, 1954 and 1958.
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This entry incorporates text from “National Weather Service Chicago” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.