Data from numerous radars unavailable

13 hours ago

Sharing a quick post this morning about communication issues impacting the National Weather Service.

Yesterday the NWS office in Wilmington, OH — the office that services a large part of southern and western Ohio, southeast Indiana and northern Kentucky — sent a notice that they were experiencing a communications outage that was impacting the dissemination of all products. Per the NWS service backup process, the NWS office in Jackson, KY took over responsibility for Wilmington’s service area.

Nearly 24 hours later, the Wilmington office is still offline. While the Jackson office has taken responsibility for forecasts and warnings, data that the office disseminates including radar data is unavailable publicly — meaning all of the NWS and FAA terminal Doppler radar data is missing. NWS Wilmington can see the data from their own NEXRAD — but would have to communicate what they are seeing to Jackson for use in products.

Wilmington is an office that has been plagued by chronic communication issues. While luckily the weather is quiet in the region currently, earlier in the year the office has been down during active severe weather events.

Then this morning, the NWS offices in Mobile and Tallahassee also appear to have lost their comms. No radar data is being disseminated from either office. Based on my own Gulf Coast NWS experience I would speculate there may be a comms break on a line both offices use for internet access — but that is just a guess. Regardless, both offices are not sharing data and other offices are having to back them up.

While luckily there is not is not a landfalling tropical system this weekend — which obviously there could be, early October is a busy period climatologically here — active weather is expected with widespread thunderstorms and potential for flash flooding. Hopefully the comms issues will be rectified quickly.

Regardless, this is yet another 24 hour period demonstrating the ongoing concerns about NWS infrastructure. While the NWS is moving forward on an IT modernization that will move to cloud based technology, that will not eliminate the need for offices to have robust, redundant internet to reach the cloud and support critical comms such as NWSChat and VOIP phone service. Hopefully the NWS is able to pursue serious improvement of their basic comms infrastructure as well as modernizing the core IT systems.