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Government Network The Internet

Weather Service Internet Systems Are Crumbling As Key Platforms Are Taxed and Failing (washingtonpost.com) 111

Posted by BeauHD from the systemic-issues-that-need-fixing dept.
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Washington Post article, written by Matthew Cappucci and Jason Samenow: The National Weather Service experienced a major, systemwide Internet failure Tuesday morning, making its forecasts and warnings inaccessible to the public and limiting the data available to its meteorologists. The outage highlights systemic, long-standing issues with its information technology infrastructure, which the agency has struggled to address as demands for its services have only increased. In addition to Tuesday morning's outage, the Weather Service has encountered numerous, repeated problems with its Internet services in recent months, including: a bandwidth shortage that forced it to propose and implement limits to the amount of data its customers can download; the launch of a radar website that functioned inadequately and enraged users; a flood at its data center in Silver Spring, Md., that has stripped access to key ocean buoy observations; and multiple outages to NWS Chat, its program for conveying critical information to broadcasters and emergency managers, relied upon during severe weather events. The Weather Service is working to evaluate and implement solutions to these problems which are, in the meantime, impacting its ability to fulfill its mission of protecting life and property. [...]

Problems with the Weather Service's Internet systems have persisted for years, in part because of increasing demand from users, which the agency has struggled to meet. In December, because of an escalating bandwidth shortage, the Weather Service proposed limiting users to 60 connections per minute on a large number of its websites. Constituents complained about the quota and, earlier this month, the Weather Service announced it would instead impose a data limit of 120 requests per minute and only on servers hosting model data, beginning April 20. Meanwhile, on March 9, the Weather Service's headquarters in Silver Spring "experienced a ruptured water pipe, which caused significant and widespread flooding," which affected a data center, the agency said in a statement. "Some NWS data stopped flowing, including data from ocean buoys," the statement said, noting some of the buoys are used "to detect and locate a seismic event that could cause a tsunami."

Neil Jacobs, former acting head of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the Weather Service, said many of the agency's Internet infrastructure problems are tied to the fact they run on internal hardware rather than through cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google Cloud. "I've demanded in writing that NWS transition these applications to our Cloud partners. It's part of an internal strategy I've laid out," Jacobs, a Trump administration appointee, told the Capital Weather Gang in an email before he left office. In July, NOAA released its Cloud Strategy, which stated, "the volume and velocity of our data are expected to increase exponentially with the advent of new observing system and data-acquisition capabilities, placing a premium on our capacity and wherewithal to scale the IT infrastructure and services to support this growth. Modernizing our infrastructure requires leveraging cloud services as a solution to meet future demand."
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Weather Service Internet Systems Are Crumbling As Key Platforms Are Taxed and Failing More

Weather Service Internet Systems Are Crumbling As Key Platforms Are Taxed and Failing

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  • Large companies (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @10:41AM (#61232422)
    It's funny how everyone has forgotten how to purchase and load an OS onto a server. The problem is that they have their own servers? Yeesh. How do they think that it would be cheaper to pay a large company do do it for them?

    • Because labor has always been an institution's biggest cost. Especially labor with expertise.

      • You pay for labor either way.

        • Think of it this way. Why doesn't automotive have their own TMSC? Why doesn't industry have their own hospitals? Simple answer is that it's cheaper and better as well as more consistent to have an outside party using mass production and distribution of costs and expertise across a larger group. The cloud is the information economies's version of mass production.

          • I still find it hard to believe it is cheaper to engage Google then to pay a 20 year old from Missouri to take care of 100 servers.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by sjames ( 1099 )

              Whenever I have looked at it, cloud only works out cheaper if you have a temporary need for added capacity.

              If the need is ongoing, it's cheaper to own.

          • I assure you, leasing space for your data center and managing it yourself is cheaper than building a chip foundry of a reasonably recent process node.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sjames ( 1099 )

            But you still have to maintain the virtual images and you still have to maintain your connection to the net so you can talk to them and the desktop machines so you have something to talk to the servers with, so you still need the skilled labor.

            This is more like should you buy a nice TV or rent one. Unless you're planning to move within a year, buying will likely be cheaper even if after 3 years you give it away rather than take it with you.

            Even "rent to own" is better than just keep renting, you'll still pa

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bengie ( 1121981 )
          Labor is cheaper at scale. If you're not big enough for scale, it's cheaper to outsource to someone who is.

          Then there's the sunk cost required to have geographically diverse data centers that all need to be manned. Only got 2 admins worth of work, but need to hire 10 admins just to staff the different locations.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        They already have that labor to run their existing data centers. What they're lacking is buying enough servers.

    • The GOVERNMENT can get better rates on AWS with locked in long term pricing but is people like AWS willing to give them. But can they get stuff like (Need FULL local VM console?) Run ANY OS in an VM? RUN EOL windows in an VM if needed for a few apps?

      • They can do MUCH better by using one of the open source clouds and then running multiple sites with various servers.
        In particular, it would allow NOAA to use these servers as both web servers and computational computers. When the web is getting hit hard, then slow down the computations. When web is slow, do a lot more computation. And it means that NOAA can better share their CPU/mem/network resources.

    • Re:Large companies (Score:5, Informative)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @11:00AM (#61232486)

      Government agencies can’t just go and purchase things whenever they are needed. There is a lengthy process involving quotes and approved vendor lists. Being on the vendor list is like winning the lottery. Knowing the government has deep pockets makes these vendors jack up prices severely. My old employer sold parts to the navy. A lot of times it was as simple as buying washers from McMaster Carr and sealing them in bags to be sold for $50 each. And that’s after we bid on the quote.

      • In any case if the US weather service is like our national weather service, having them go offline will improve the overall quality of weather reporting.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )

        Government agencies can’t just go and purchase things whenever they are needed.

        Very true.

        There is a lengthy process involving quotes and approved vendor lists.

        The lengthy process part of that statement is definitely true. The approved vendor lists part is misleading.
        For certain things, like the consulting engineering business I work for, many government agencies pre-approve "vendors". For certain government agencies, we got on those lists through a regular lengthy "bidding" process, but are not g

      • Planning. Something commercial enterprises do often, and something the NWS, and some other key agencies, ought to have been doing for a while now.

        I can't easily describe this as anything but incompetence. It's been too long, and too obvious, for anything else. Where the root of the incompetence lies we can debate, but it cannot be assigned to a convenient scapegoat, unless you're not really interested in solutions.

        And the current Biden administration, having proposed or received the recommended 'infrastruc

    • Re:Large companies (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @11:35AM (#61232588) Homepage Journal

      Err... the problem isn't the expense of the servers, it's the expense of someone who has the skills to run the server properly.

      As long as I can remember -- and that's a long time now -- managers have balked at paying a genuine expert what he's worth, and have tried to make up for it by hiring lots of cheaper workers. A small cadre of experts is actually cheaper and easier to manage than an army of semi-competents, and does a better job.

      Government is particularly vulnerable to this dysfunctional mentality, because it would be politically unpopular to pay someone above the usual rate to do a particular job. But that's exactly what you *should* do: offer a little more than the going rate in order to have your pick of the best candidates. This is not to say there aren't excellent IT people in the government, but they're held back by a mass of dead wood that slows work down so they can keep up.

      If you aren't willing to do what it takes to consistently hire the best, you probably *are* better off contracting out as many services as you can.

      • If you aren't willing to hire system admins and understand that technology is of critical importance for any business now, then you probably should have packed it up as a business sometime in the 80's.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hey! ( 33014 )

          It's not all-or-nothing. There's a lot of treading water with your nose barely above the surface going on.

          • Only because industry has not made their technology staff as important and treated as well as lawyers and accountants. But they are as important, if not not more important today.

        • What if you CAN'T hire more because you don't have the budget and you're not a business but a government service? Demand has increased, the budget has not. In a business, higher demand would mean an opportunity for higher profits, but not so at a government agency.

      • Sounds like it's too dangerous for our society to trust the weather work to the government.

        • Re:Large companies (Score:5, Insightful)

          by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @12:29PM (#61232840)

          Sounds like it's too dangerous for our society to trust the weather work to the government.

          You're not far off. The underfunding and lack of resources is deliberate. At least fifteen years ago [onthecommons.org] Republicans wanted to privatize the weather service. Two years ago, the person picked to head NOAA, under which the weather service resides, used to be CEO at AccuWeather [wildfiretoday.com].

          It's the same reason the head of the USPS is deliberately slowing down the mail service, reducing offices, reducing hours and so on. It's to make it seem the government can't do anything right so the obvious answer is to privatize it. And by privatizing, that means you and I will pay more for less while some CEO at a private company gets their million dollar bonus so they can contribute to Republican campaigns.

          • Exactly— this is at least 80% of the current problem. NWS is arguably more important than USPS to the country, and talks of privatization are all about stealing a huge, immensely valuable organization that does over 90% of the work in forecasting for all the other private companies that use their data.

          • Never mind that AccuWeather got most of its data from the government agency anyway, probably one of those customers who were angry at being throttled down to 60 requests a minute.

          • For the past fifteen years we've had, what, 6 years of Republican presidents. And within that, control of Congress has been back and forth.

            This isn't a partisan issue. It's bureaucratic.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by gtall ( 79522 )

          No, it sounds like it is too dangerous for the government to be forced to farm out work to private companies because it Republicans get all excited about private enterprise, which promptly turns around and screws the government on pricing.

          To make matters worse, the Republicans have been slashing discretionary funding which goes for these agencies. They have no constituency to fight for them, so they were easy pickings.

          It didn't that the former alleged president decided he could use a sharpie to change a hur

      • As long as I can remember -- and that's a long time now -- managers have balked at paying a genuine expert what he's worth, and have tried to make up for it by hiring lots of cheaper workers.

        This would explain the slow, crappy, bug-ridden software I have to deal with every day coming out of Microsoft, Adobe, ServiceNow, et al.

      • But if you hire an employee of your own, you have some control. You can say " here are my requirements that we need to meet to satisfy our customers." When you outsource to the cloud you can end up stuck paying exorbitant prices to customize differently than the one-size-fits-all basic service. What would the weather service on AWS look like? How long for an update to trickle out to all the servers so that the data hungry customers who are currently polling multiple times a second?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hey! ( 33014 )

          Well, you have to know what you're paying for, and what you're actually paying for is in the contract. I'd think if you did it right it wouldn't "look" any different. Netflix uses AWS and people by in large don't know. As for latency and consistency, it's a matter of selecting the right packages services. I don't think the NWS has particularly stringent requirements for either -- if updates take a few minutes to get to all users it's not going to be a big deal.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sjames ( 1099 )

            Netflix did their development in-house. They control when updates roll out. The cloud is effectively a bunch of rented machines to them.

            I'm guessing they use the cloud because their load is highly volatile.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by hey! ( 33014 )

              Sure. You should never bake a piece of infrastructure you don't own into the code of an app, because then the vendor has you by the short-and-curlies. But that doesn't mean you can't *use* that infrastructure.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by sjames ( 1099 )

                It's fine to use the infrastructure when it makes financial sense, but do so with full knowledge that it doesn't mean you no longer need highly skilled people to maintain everything. You can't just push that to the cloud.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        The VMs in the cloud don't set up and run themselves...

    • That statement may have been referring to the flood that took out their servers in Silver Spring, MD. AWS offers services to keep your database running in multiple availability zones (AZ) simultaneously so that if one AZ fails due to a natural disaster or extended power outage, the other(s) will likely still be available. Since keeping a database consistent in multiple locations and automatically switching from one AZ to another in the event of an outage isn't exactly child's play, this feature is certain
    • If I could make up an example of why they SHOULD go onto a cloud instead of "loading an OS onto a server," this would be it:

      on March 9, the Weather Service's headquarters in Silver Spring "experienced a ruptured water pipe, which caused significant and widespread flooding," which affected a data center, the agency said in a statement. "Some NWS data stopped flowing, including data from ocean buoys

      Abstracting individual servers to avoid an outage from this type of event is precisely what "cloud" means, and

    • How do they think that it would be cheaper to pay a large company do do it for them?

      I assume you didn't rear up a chicken from scratch before eating dinner last night? How would it be cheaper to pay a farmer to farm, a slaughterhouse to slaughter and butcher to butcher than simply raising your own chicken from scratch!

      The reality is a large company doing ${SPECIFIC_THING} is only successful IF they can do it cheaper and better than someone rolling their own. That is true for putting food on the table, it's true for cloud services.

      • There is a monster difference between a farmer and a cloud datacenter. The farmer actually has to have expensive equipment and land. Thus the people with the knowledge on how to farm are found on that land and you can't just hire them to farm in your back yard. On the contrary, the fact that servers are expensive to set up are largely fabricated. People who know what they are doing with them are plentiful and they can do it for cheap almost anywhere if they know what they are doing.

        • On the contrary, the fact that servers are expensive to set up are largely fabricated.

          Sure you can setup a server for cheap. Now have you set up multiple services in geographically diverse locations with scalable infrastructure to support load shifting between servers on demand and as redundancy requires, now you're no longer cheap.

    • Because there's a lot more to it and there are economies of scale when [amazon, google, microsoft] does it.

    • While I tend to think local management is preferable, some of the NWS services might actually benefit from a cloud deployment. The benefit/risk/cost analysis sounds pretty involved:

      - The NWS services are mission critical. Hosting needs a high level of redundancy and distributed alternate sites. The large commercial cloud providers can easily provide widely distributed services with automated failover routing and built-in distributed backups.

      - The load level of the public-facing services are not consisten

  • Well since we've paid for the data, security leaks via the cloud shouldn't be as big a problem.

    • Well since we've paid for the data, security leaks via the cloud shouldn't be as big a problem.

      Exactly; this is literally data being provided free to the public. No security worries here.

      • Even to your enemies? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Do you want to provide all information to your enemies? Other countries or entities that you are in conflict with or even actual all out war? If you open all your data and systems to everyone, then when you need to restrict your enemies without harming yourself how do you do that?

        Migrating everything to a commercial cloud means that any changes the cloud-vender makes, you must adapt all your applications and data. If you run your own servers, you can run your known-old systems as long as you want. How o

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by skids ( 119237 )

          This data is unlikely to contain anything sensitive and not really a prime target for tampering. So cloud components taking advantage of colocation with peering points are, for once, a perfectly viable component. As long as they can provide the reliability needed by the provider/consumer systems and they don't upchuck due to servers being live migrated behind the scenes.

          Point taken as to managed services forcing unwarranted and sometimes dangerous upgrades. But you can always rent bare metal at one extre

  • LOL (Score:5, Funny)

    by Scutter ( 18425 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @10:49AM (#61232454) Journal

    "Move everything to the cloud! It'll solve all our problems!"

    --Every short-sighted IT manager ever

    • "Move everything to the cloud! It'll solve all our problems!"

      --Every short-sighted IT manager ever

      Well, like the self driving car fanbois say, it only has to be better than the alternative ... which doesn't seem to be doing very well, does it?

      • There are way more obvious ways to fix the alternative than throwing money at Google or Microsoft. Basic things like interviewing and hiring people who know what they are doing.

    • "Move everything to the cloud! It'll solve all our problems!"
      --Every short-sighted IT manager ever

      Weather Service systems "in the cloud" -- what could go wrong?
      Have they even seen the weather recently? Oh, wait ...

    • Moving to a cloud would actually help them. Moving to a PRIVATE cloud will cost them a great deal of $
      By simply creating their own cloud, amongst the various NOAA sites, combined with adding gig drops into the sites, they can then run a cloud, in which they allocate web services as needed, but then use the remaining CPU cycles for computation, which is IMPORTANT to NOAA.

  • Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ucfdave ( 7940394 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @10:57AM (#61232476)
    I have worked on several large system designs for NWS and this does not surprise me at all. They are good at weather, but terrible at enterprise systems. That is not bad if you know that you are terrible, they do not. They believe they understand infrastructure as well as they know weather. My company has many NOAA contracts for design, deployment and sustainment of enterprise systems, we will not however bid on any NWS contracts as they are too dysfunctional to work with. Almost, but not quite, as bad as NASA - that is an organization that is seriously messed up.

    • Yeah...I needed to tap into the weather radar for something a while back...

      Files written round-robbin on a public ftp server. In some wrong-endian binary blob data structure which the manual described in terms of "words" and double-length "words" which on a late 80s vax meant two bytes.

      "Transitioning" to the cloud ought to be fun. All the same legacy data formats and vax emulators running on vms is going to be somehow more manageable.

  • Not really. I can still stream Stormy's OnlyFans videos with no problems.

  • A common problem (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @11:16AM (#61232512) Journal

    Almost every new client we get who is having performance problems with their website or web services turns out to be using internal servers. And it's like pulling teeth trying to get them to change.

    Fine, you don't want to give business to Amazon? Well, use SiteGround, use somebody ... just don't keep using you. No, it's not easy. No, you really don't know how to do it, not well enough. Not as well as somebody with many thousands of customers where that's all they do.

    • Any company is free to hire who they want. I think maybe if there is a problem, it is that HR too often interviews for people that SAY they can do the job but then find out they can't.

    • We went to cloudflare reluctantly. You lose a lot of things in the process, but it is about the only practical approach today.

  • Developers need to plan for limited bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chipperdog ( 169552 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @11:21AM (#61232540) Homepage
    NWS radar site went from serving 100KB of gifs for a multi layer interface (like 20KB for a pre-flattened one) a few MB of TIFFs... it's no wonder they have issues.. Also app developers need to be encouraged to use things like the NWWS ( https://www.weather.gov/nwws/ [weather.gov] ), NOAAPORT or EMWIN feeds to populate their own databases/caches to feed their apps instead accessing NWS servers (bonus if the can feed off satellite broadcasts instead of internet) .. Also, maybe we need to bring back the local VHF EMWIN transmitters (or multiplex data stream on NWR, could a 'sub-audible' data stream reach a high enough bitrate) so there are more "push" options for end users

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rrjj ( 3857477 )
      Not hard to see the noaa/weather.gov design failures over the past year or two. Most obvious example being their radar page. Once a simple animated gif now dependent on multiple 3rd party XSS providers and still labeled as "New Radar Landing Page" with no link to the older, more accessible and more functional page. Illustrates how we need, today more than ever, a new GOSIP, limiting outsourcing, XSS and XSC. DHS should be spearheading that effort but they seem to have become focused on collecting 'all t

      • This replacing a page with a crap version that does less seems to be coincident with the use of interns or junior devs in many shops.

        • NOAA's new weather RADAR images have turned to pure, unusable crap.

          I actually catch myself looking at Weather Underground's RADAR because NOAA's is unusable.

          Whoever made this "improvement" needs to be terminated.

      • Exactly, they are trying to be like commercial web pages..they should stick to basic (but complete) data distribution, let people/companies who specialize in web development take that and "make it pretty"

      • Back during Hurricane Charley (2004) the NWS radar map loop was 10 gif images displayed in a row. I remember saving the images and constructing my own page so I could see a longer trend series (as in "oh crap, its turning towards Punta Gorda"). The current system of "latest technology" sucks up server cycles and bandwidth. Hosting that monstrosity on a cloud provider is definitely expensive.
        If they want to use public cloud: they need simple, small downloads.

  • Facegooginstarest, but can't support vital infrastructure. Idiocracy is now.

  • The NOAA's weather resources are invaluable for lots of people. I personally donate the servers to a project called 7Timer [7timer.info], which uses NOAA's GFS to calculate weather for astronomers (astro-seeing and atmospheric transparency) among other things (and also make a free iOS weather app based on it called Xasteria). Interestingly, the servers I donate for that project are in the cloud, and they are slower and costlier than the original in-house servers, but, sadly those servers where in a Chinese public institu

  • Demand to be Nickelled and Dimed to death...

  • What Are Their Connection Rates - To Cloud or Not (Score:4, Insightful)

    by theshowmecanuck ( 703852 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @11:48AM (#61232658) Journal
    If NOAA and the NWS see a near constant rate for connections to their services, then the cloud is the most shit thing they could do in terms of money. You pay a hefty premium to host your stuff in the cloud, even considering equipment, location, employees (I refuse to say resources, that thinking is killing us), utilities, etc. The only thing that makes the cloud economic is if you don't know the number of servers you need, and that number changes rapidly all the time (e.g. Netflix new movies coming out). I've done work at large and small organizations that want to use 'the cloud', and one of the first things you see them realizing is that they have to get all their IT folks, developers, testers, etc. to shut down their instances at the end of the day because their IT costs are ballooning from having the same number of instances running that they used to have when it was on premise. But if by and large, the NWS sees a relatively stable connection rate over a long period of time, then on premise is more economical for the American tax payer. And for times it gets busy, even pricing in a moderate buffer and then throttling will still be a better option. The silver bullet cloud spouted by directors, CEOs, and other C level wankers is a myth propagated by salesmen with golden forked tongues. Neil Jacobs is an idiot based on this one little snippet.

    • Probably not worth it to cloud the whole thing, but Akamaizing the larger content would probably make sense.

      • Yeah, absolutely. That is definitely a good option to consider in many cases. Content Distribution Networks make good money for a reason. (y)

        I'll add to my first,

        The only thing that makes the cloud economic is if you don't know the number of servers you need, and that number changes rapidly all the time (e.g. Netflix new movies coming out).

        AND you can hybridize it, e.g. if your use case bias is towards more steady connection rates for long periods of time with the chances of occasional very high demand

    • I was seeing messages from Azure DevOps that I (personally) was being throttle for too many data requests, and all I was doing was loading the team's dashboard. A person running a department wide meeting with hundreds of attendees regularly had that throttling message show up. And the up-time for the cloud services were not good. Now granted, Microsoft sucks at the cloud, and everything else it does, but it does highlight problems of what happens when you try to outsource as much as possible.

  • Has anyone suggested they use torrents?
  • And let the free market sort it out. Or is it impossible to wean the self-sufficient capitalists from free government services?
  • Mismanaged and falling apart by design.

  • Bittorrent Streaming (Score:5, Interesting)

    by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @12:06PM (#61232746)
    Since much of their data is offered for free, NWS could make their data available through a Bittorrent streaming service and distribute the bandwidth, and its inherent cost, among their clients. Those clients are getting extremely valuable data for free, so the cost of being forced to upload some of it to other clients is a small price to pay. It may require a decent amount of upfront cost for NWS to convert the distribution of the data, but Bittorrent is a mature protocol that scales pretty damn well, so their scaling issues should be solved fairly permanently after that transition.
    • Or, you know, add some mirrors, most of the data is one way. The weather service seems to be important, trusting a third party cloud service is a dumb idea.

      • Edge caching for static data would have to be orders of magnitude cheaper than moving the entire infrastructure to a cloud infrastructure. How many of their products are dynamically generated at request time?

    • But part of the NWS advantage is being low latency. Many customers will not accept raw data that is more than a few seconds old. Do you want tornado alerts showing up late? This is not about getting static data spread out to a lot of CDNs. Also NWS has push services, sending out messages and alerts, it is not a generic web site that just presents data. It is collecting data in the first place, processing the data, presenting processed data, and pushing data. Mirrors and CDNs do not solve the problem NW

      • Low-latency messages, such as tornado alerts, usually do not consume a lot of bandwidth. It's been a while since I've looked at weather data but back when I did the majority of the bandwidth-intensive data was related to map data, such as high-resolution radar maps, jet stream maps, etc. I wouldn't expect low-latency, low-bandwidth alerts to go out over the same endpoints as high-bandwidth map data and if they did, new endpoints could be easily created which separate the two types of data.
  • It seems the theme of the day is an unwillingness of companies to believe that technology staff have become as important as lawyers and accountants to the survival of a business. They do nothing but fight it and it does nothing but hurt them over and over.

  • The NWS has for a long time been a bright star showing how socialist organizations can work.

    But even they are not immune from government incompetence, because incompetence in one place insists on incompetence in other places.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      The problems with the NWS is the politicians who want to privatize the distribution end of it, forcing Americans pay a vendor for data created with their tax dollars.

      Not surprisingly nobody is for privatizing the complicated and expensive bits of NWS; they want the public to continue to fund those things while choking of public access at the relatively easy and generic job of distributing data. That creates easy profits for donors.

  • To me it is the Cell Phone's weather apps and people on the cell phones constantly pressing 'refresh' every minute or so. These apps should only poll NOAA once per hour at a minimum. If a person hits refresh, nothing should happen until at least one hour passes since the last refresh.

  • Why can't they use modern computing clusters and use machine learning to make more accurate predictions?

    Cloud? What the fuck is thar guy talking about. You don't do numerical computing in the cloud.

  • Specifically the VA.

    I can tell you that most of our techs at Tier2 are shit. Not all, but a good majority of Tier3 techs won't accept responsibility for their fuckups because they're usually a GS-12 or GS-13 full time telework, they don't want anything to tarnish their reputation for losing their job.

    The biggest plus, and minus of working for the government is job security. Even if someone is a complete fuckup, they have all kinds of tools at their disposal to make a managers life hell. So most managers j

  • I know I received a notification a few weeks ago that there was going to be an upgrade on NWSChat, and from the limited information they gave it sounded like an AS change for a new ISP connection. The fact that it was so urgent and customer-impacting indicates they were in dire straits.

    I'd argue that the NWS IT infrastructure would be going the way our bridges and highways are going...it's something our country relies on, but probably hasn't had the funding it requires in a long time, and now the cracks are

  • The new front-end is garbage. It downloads a lot of stuff you don't even want. I get that they had to dump the old Flash front because it was EOL'd, but they could still give us the option of a simple animated GIF for the local radar, or the regional GIF (or the lastest still frames for either). It's not there any more--at least not where I could easily find it. Instead you've got this monster that defaults to showing you almost the whole west coast, and by the time you've homed in on your county, you'v

  • The commercial services have become so bloaed with video ads they are unuseable, people started going to the ad free and fast loading NWS sites. However, which are underfunded and cant seem to handle the increasing demands. I second the idea that NWS public system should use bittorrent, if people want to get free forecasts than help contribute to the bandwidth capacity.,One technical issue is latency while weather data tends to age pretty quickly.

  • This guy is a FUCKING idiot, and is well known for being it.

    Moving all this to private companies is NOT the answer. Moving to CLOUD, would have helped, but, simply going to AWS, MS, etc really would have increased costs, not decreased.

    What is needed is for NOAA to adopt cloud, HOWEVER, run it on their own servers, split around the nation. There are multiple cloud software, such as Ubuntu, that makes it easy and cheap to bring it in-house, and run it across multiple locations.

  • NOAA used to have very good Doppler weather RADAR graphics. It simply showed a topographic map of an area with color coded reflectivity.

    A few months ago, it went to a very poor resolution and unreliable "blocky" format that is orders of magnitude worse. So bad I stopped using it.

    It's one of those "improvements" that took a giant leap backward.

  • Meanwhile, there's no restrictions on Canada's free weather and climate data access: https://eccc-msc.github.io/ope... [github.io]

    And yup, the Canadian weather radar layers include all of North America... see it for yourself: https://eccc-msc.github.io/ope... [github.io]

    Hope this is useful to some of you :-)

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