Friday, January 22, 2021

Everything Is Broken...

For those of you who use weather.utah.edu, my apologies for the very long outage of model graphics and derived products.  

We have occasional outages sometimes due to computer or networking issues at the University of Utah. We also have them from time to time due to crappy programing on my part. 

The current one, however, is due to scheduled downtime of the NOAA server that serves as host for model data produced by the National Weather Service. Such downtime is typically postponed if the National Weather Service declares a "critical weather day," but neither yesterday or today met the criteria for such a day outlined at https://www.nws.noaa.gov/directives/sym/pd01022003curr.pdf.  The potential for heavy snowfall in the Wasatch certainly apparently meets critical weather day status for us, but not the nation.  Thus, the downtime went forward as scheduled.   

The last update issued on the server was at 1339 UTC (0639 MST) when a statement was issued that the maintenance was complete and they were working to get systems back online.  Sadly, nothing yet.

There are a couple of other options for receiving some of the model data, so you may find it elsewhere, possibly at lower spatial or temporal resolution depending on the site and how they are receiving the data.  

NOMADS has been pretty reliable until recently.  I may have to build some redundancy into our software if this continues, although critical data for some of what we access isn't available elsewhere.  

Thus, rather than looking at model data today, I'm burning skis and praying for snow.

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