Reposted by Cliff Mass Weather Blog
March 14, 2021
Broken water pipe removes US buoy data
I have received a number of emails from people asking about the lack of US buoy data in the past few days.
You’re right … something happened. A burst pipe and flood shut down a critical NOAA data facility in Silver Spring, Maryland No estimate when this data source will be available. In fact, other important data sources are also affected, such as: B. the coastal ocean locations (CMAN) and even some airport locations.
The situation is described on the NOAA National Data Buoy Center website:
Buoy data over the oceans is a very important weather data source supporting both numerical weather forecast and marine activities. In fact, there are two main types of ocean buoys: fixed or moored buoys, which have a relatively wide range of weather / ocean observations, and floating buoys that move freely around the ocean (see pictures below).
Fixed buoys:
Drift buoy:
To give you an idea of the distribution and number of buoy dates, here is an example of the locations of the floating buoy dates immediately prior to the water leak (which occurred on March 9th). Already a couple!
The locations of fixed buoys (including lighthouses on the coast) can be found here:
The loss of much of this data is a problem for numerical weather forecasting, which uses oceanic data to provide information about surface conditions over the oceans. The plot of the buoys used in the US JRC’s global weather forecasting model shows the severity of the problem, with 3/4 of the buoy data gone.
And the ocean data on the coast has dropped to zero.
Now, in addition to being a problem for weather forecasting, the lack of marine data can be an even bigger problem for those involved in ship operations who use weather data to manage ports and sea routes. The loss of ocean observations on the surface puts life and property at risk.
This failure is important because it shows the vulnerability of critical data infrastructures at NOAA with dependencies on individual servers and the lack of backup systems. There are others.
NOAA operations urgently need “hot” backups that can be applied immediately if the primary servers fail.
This applies not only to the recording of observations, but also to the critically important weather modeling. Cloud-based backups are one way to do this at a reasonable cost. And there’s always the old-fashioned way of maintaining independent servers in different locations.
Regardless of NOAA’s approach, creating a more robust data and modeling infrastructure should be a high priority.
I’m sure there are people at Microsoft and Amazon who would love to help
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