Apr 06, 2021
Internet bandwidth issues at the National Weather Service are hampering the agency’s ability to get its forecasts and warnings out to the public, according to a recent report by the Washington Post. Most recently, NWS experienced a systemwide failure at its College Park data center that impacted networks nationwide.
According to March 30 status reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction, several weather offices and forecasters at air traffic control centers nationwide lost communications with the NWS Network Control Facility (NCF), impacting the dissemination and reception of weather data, including observations. Several websites, including weather.gov, went down. NSWChat was inaccessible outside of the NCEP network and the Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System was not ingesting external partner data.