National Weather Service Weather Radar Disaster

There are few more important weather data sets collected by the National Weather Service than weather radar.

article in the Washington Post and a tsunami of negative comments in social media.

Software engineering has never been a strong suit of the National Weather Service and they have had problems on their online weather web sites for year and software issues have plagued their numerical weather prediction efforts for decades.   Even today, local National Weather Service offices lack sufficient communication bandwidth to secure all the high-resolution weather products they could use profitably.

Recently, the National Weather Service, crippled by lack of an ability to get data out to the national community, has started to restrict access to their servers, a move that could undermine the use of its model data by the private sector (including major weather companies like IBM/WeatherChannel, Accuweather, and others).

A key issue is that the National Weather Service insists on using early century data distribution technology, using their own servers for national distribution of large data sets.

The solution to the National Weather Service data problem is obvious, particularly to the technologically inclined among this blog's readers: make use of cloud distribution of the weather radar and other large data sets.

It turns out that the National Weather Service is ALREADY moving the FULL weather radar data set in REAL TIME to Amazon Cloud Services. The radar data is already there (see below, NEXRAD is the radar data).


So instead of distributing radar data through their own servers, the National Weather Service should have their radar web site hosted in the "cloud", where the data is already resident.  

A modern approach that would afford essentially instantaneous access to the vast NWS radar data set.  The same is true of the other important data sets created by the National Weather Service (such as forecast model and weather satellite information).

So for those of you looking for weather radar data, what can you do?


Or if you want national radar information, try out the NOAA/NWS Aviation Center radar site.

Another possibility is the College of DuPage radar site.

For me, a good weather radar app is the key and the one I used is Radarscope (see below).   Inexpensive and very easy to use, and available for both Android and iPhone.  Plus you get access to the most high-resolution data.


The deeper question, of course, is how National Weather Service management missed such an obvious failure mode and why the National Weather Service software engineering and modeling has been allowed to fall well behind the state-of-the-art.  

Perhaps it is time for a private sector Weather-X.  But that should be a subject of another blog.

_________________

I will do a new weather podcast tomorrow!  The New Year forecast, plus I will explain, why there are wind gusts.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Time of Year You Can See the Air Move

Image
  Most of the time, you can not see the air move.   You can feel it, but the complex, turbulent motions are invisible to you, except when it interacts with leaves and branches on trees and plants. But for a few weeks of the year, the sky is full of small, cotton-like tuffs that like a natural MRI machine reveals the complex three-dimensional motions of the atmosphere.   Cottonwood season.  And we right in the middle of it.   Being cottonwood aware is of particular value this year.  It reveals the active dispersion and movement of air that makes the outdoors essentially COVID safe, and thus should be of some comfort for those nervous about transmission outside. Cottonwood seeds are embedded in small cotton-like fibers.   A million seeds weigh about 3 pounds.  Yes, each seed and tuff weights about .000003 pounds.   And that fact, plus the cottonwood tuff, means that these seeds fall VERY, VERY, VERY slowly.   So slowly that they are excellent markers for the three-dimensional flow of the
Read more

Why so little lightning in the Pacific Northwest? And a very nice weekend ahead.

Image
During the past 24-hours, there have been a few lightning strokes over the region (see below) but nothing to write home about (see below). It turns out that the Pacific Northwest and the remainder of the West Coast have some of the lowest frequencies of thunderstorms in the entire country (see below). But why?    My podcast provides the answer. And I also give the weekend forecast....and I think most will like what I have to say. To listen to my podcast, use the link below or access it through your favorite podcast service. Some major podcast servers:     Like the podcast? Support on Patreon 
Read more

Strong Atmosphere River Heads into British Columbia and Southeast Alaska

Image
While the Northwest has been drier than normal, it has been drenching wet a few hundred miles to the north. An unusually strong atmospheric river ....a long current of moisture stretching southward to the subtropics...has been in place for days, bringing large amounts of water vapor to Alaska.   And the atmospheric river will be in place for several more days, slowly moving southward. To illustrate, the scale and beauty of the atmospheric river, here is a water vapor satellite image for 11 AM today. The lighter areas have more water vapor.  You can see the current of moisture extending from near Hawaii into central BC.  This current is the result of low pressure over the Gulf of Alaska and high pressure offshore of California.   A forecast of total water vapor content in the atmosphere for 11 PM tonight shows a healthy atmospheric river (white and blue colors indicate the higher amounts of moisture). As this atmospheric river slams into the mountainous West Coast, the air is forced to
Read more