As an outbreak of severe weather moved through the central part of the United States overnight into Tuesday, a key part of the nation’s weather tracking system experienced an outage, potentially affecting forecasters’ ability to warn people of dangerous weather.
Radar data sites for the National Weather Service experienced a “network outage” over the course of five hours, according to Michael Musher, a meteorologist and spokesman for the service. “During this outage, some warning services were impacted,” he said.
The outage was initially believed to have lasted four hours, but the Weather Service issued a revised statement Tuesday afternoon.
Preliminary storm reports compiled by the Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center suggested hail and winds had swept through the center of the country on Monday night into Tuesday. Tornadoes were reported in Oklahoma.
Thunderstorms and tornadoes were expected on Tuesday afternoon and evening across much of the Ohio Valley in the Midwest and South.
In Pueblo, Colo., the network went down at about 11:40 p.m. local time, said Makoto Moore, a meteorologist there. The National Weather Service in Boulder, Colo., covered Pueblo’s duties until the network was restored at about 3 a.m., said Mr. Moore, adding that he couldn’t remember the last time something similar had happened.
“That was basically it,” he said. “We were fortunate enough that we did not have any severe weather.”
Storms toppled trees and kicked up strong winds, hail and rain overnight in the St. Louis area, where the network went down for local National Weather Service meteorologists, who relied on backup procedures for disruptions.
“The Kansas City office was able to back us up,” said Jared Maples, a meteorologist with the St. Louis Weather Service office who was not on duty at the time but was made aware of the issue. “We did have storms moving through the area which were strong to severe, and in any situation, we do have backups we rely on, and those plans have tertiary backups.”
By 6:30 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, service had returned to normal, Mr. Musher, the Weather Service spokesman, said. “Our Weather Service IT team mitigated the issue by moving network services from our data center in College Park, Md., to Boulder, Colo.”
“We’re working with the vendor right now to identify the root cause of the outage,” he added.
Such an outage is “very, very rare,” said Mark Taylor, a weather technology consultant, but could be dangerous during extreme weather. “During severe outbreaks, things can develop very quickly. Time is of the essence when it comes to alerting, especially for tornadoes,” he added.
The post As Severe Storms Moved Through, U.S. Weather Warning System Faced an ‘Outage’ appeared first on New York Times.