Weather Service Faces Internet Bandwidth Shortage, Proposes Limiting Key Data (washingtonpost.com) 67
For the past decade, the National Weather Service has been plagued by failures in disseminating critical forecast and warning information that is aimed at protecting lives and saving property. In some cases, its websites have gone down during severe weather events, unable to handle the demand. From a report: Other agency systems, including information and data streams that deliver vital weather modeling data to broadcast meteorologists and commercial users, have also suffered periodic outages. Now, during a year that featured record California wildfires and the busiest Atlantic hurricane season on record, the Weather Service says it has an Internet bandwidth problem and is seeking to throttle back the amount of data its most demanding users can access. The Weather Service, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), announced the proposed limits in a memo dated Nov. 18. "As demand for data continues to grow across NCEP websites, we are proposing to put new limits into place to safeguard our web services," the memo stated, referring to the Weather Service's National Centers for Environmental Prediction. "The frequency of how often these websites are accessed by the public has created limitations and infrastructure constraints."
Content Delivery Network (Score:3, Insightful)
Use one.
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well aren't you a genius. those cost money, which they don't have.
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Assuming you have money to do either of those things. If you don't, then what you do is what they're proposing here: to limit access.
It doesn't matter if that costs more than it saves, as long as it costs someone else -- even *everyone* else.
Re:Content Delivery Network (Score:4, Interesting)
Science is never done. And atmospheric science (or "the weather" if those words scare you) is of such importance in day-to-day life that it's probably worth it to add whatever in-house capacity is needed to serve it instead of outsourcing to Cloudflare and hoping it works when there's a hurricane coming. In Houston we had 4 almost hit this year, that swung either side at the last minute. The TV news reports on that, but usually not in real time, and I'd rather look at the raw data myself. They almost never report on air quality, and I check that at least once a day to plan the best time for my daily exercise. The job I had last year involved deployments of satellite and other RF receivers, and it was exceedingly useful to have realtime radar, cloud cover, atmospheric pressure information available for any point on the map at any given time.
Maybe you don't pay attention to these things, that doesn't mean they don't matter. I'm assuming this has something to do with Ventusky going down last night, meaning it's already disrupted my life.
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They have plenty of money for that. It would require a knowledgeable IT staff and an update to mainframe software, which they can't find any documentation for.
They have plenty of dough to replace their supercomputer system, they replaced a 2016 Cray/IBM system with Dell in 2018 and they are again replacing that with IBM/Cray this year, each time with a 10 year maintenance contract. 2 year old supercomputers aren't exactly old and switching vendors and architectures every 2 years and cancelling 8 years out of a 10 year contract isn't cheap.
Do you have any citations to back up your claims?
I would like to read more about these upgrades and what happened to the older equipment. It should be "a matter of public record".
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You should be complaining about the lack of capital letters. The punctuation would be fine in various eras, placement of commas is an old subject of argument.
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Re:Content Delivery Network (Score:4, Insightful)
The cost of the feasibility study alone would probably approach their bandwidth expenses.
P2P IPFS or BTFS and RSS diffs over IRC (Score:2)
That's a lot of jargon in the subject line!
The parent is correct.
Peer to Peer file systems like IPFS - Interplanetary File System, and BTFS - BitTorrent File System, together with digitally signed updates using RSS - Really Simple Syndication, to send updates or diffs.
In the case of BTFS the signed RSS feed will contain magnet links to the DHT - Distributed Hash Table. Use IRC - Internet relay Chat, to serve backup RSS feeds and use more than one physical infrastructure to connect, and you'll have a good re
Re:Content Delivery Network (Score:4)
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You don't have a clue how government agencies operate. Gee why didn't they think of that solution...
They are very likely not being allowed to (Score:1)
This is one of those nasty little political things nobody much thinks about. It's about climate change. The goal here is to stop reports that lend credence to it's effects and maintain plausible deniability. We do the same thing with guns by blocking research into gun deaths (and there goes my karma, but I've got pl
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I believe there is a vested interest on the part of third parties who want to provide weather information to the public that the government limit/block the ability of the NOAA to provide weather information directly to the public. These third parties would prefer the public-funded NOAA weather information to be available only to them so that they can sell it to the public.
I think that the publicly available, free NOAA weather information is among the top reasons to have a national weather service. If the
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I'm not surprised at all. Many small towns curled up and died for all intents and purposes when the Interstate Highway system went live. You can question whether they're being selfish, but you can't exactly say they're wrong to believe the presence of a faster
Re:Content Delivery Network (Score:5, Informative)
How did this comment get +5 insightful?
They do use one. The biggest one, in fact:
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: nomads.bldr.ncep.noaa.gov
Address: 140.172.138.18
Aliases: nomads.ncep.noaa.gov
nomads.ncep.noaa.gov.akadns.net
akadns.net is Akamai, the world's largest CDN, unless AWS has passed them recently.
I spot-checked the FQDN list they published, and many of them are behind Akamai. Some are not, and I would assume there are good reasons for that.
The data at NWS is frequently changing, which works against caching. You don't want a 5 minute old radar image of a 80 MPH storm.
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You don't want a 5 minute old radar image of a 80 MPH storm.
Errr what? Why not. Or are you telling me that you don't show advanced predictions of where the storm is likely to move or display progressions? If you *need* 5 minute updates on the storm even for crisis management you're doing something very wrong.
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There are tons of professions that need as close to real-time as it gets.
Even those radar images you see on the local news come from NWS over the Internet. They may have their own radar, but they use composite data from NWS.
As a SkyWarn spotter, I need to be able to know when I have to take shelter, but also need to be able to stay outside as long as I can to record and communicate conditions back to NWS.
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As a SkyWarn spotter, I need to be able to know when I have to take shelter
Then you better re-read my post. Because if you can't figure out when to take shelter based on an advanced prediction and instead only look at current readings every 5 minutes you're going to get yourself killed.
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There are tons of professions that need as close to real-time as it gets.
Sure. So create paid real-time feeds for those professionals to use while leaving free, unrestricted but not-necessarily real-time, data available to the general public.
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They got along "fine" for a certain definition of "fine" -- which included dying in unexpected weather events like tornadoes, hurricanes and floods.
They got along "fine" with doctors that consulted horoscopes for diagnosis and who used arsenic and mercury as antibiotics -- which at least worked after a fashion.
Comment (Score:3)
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Nope, not gonna happen. Every inch of web site real estate must be fully packed with every conceivable doodad to get your attention. Have you not seen The Weather Channel's site? Refreshing tickers, full motion video, jumping purple gorillas, anything and everything a web "designer" can think of to show off their skills.
This isn't about allowing people to get information quickly and easily. It's about showing off your web skills.
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The weather channel is total shit, even when it does work. A couple years ago it just refused to work at all for me, some weird UI bug it seemed like, search bar where you type in your location wasn't working. Stayed like that for weeks. Could I have tried other another browser? Sure. But instead, I discovered Ventusky [ventusky.com] which is 1000x better.
But, it does appear to be down as of last night - first time I've ever seen it down, and I check it multiple times a day. I'm guessing it may have to do with the issue i
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This Ventusky site is cool!
Thanks for this.
There's even an app for it which i'm downloading now.
-jj
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You're conflating three different sites:
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I went to the weather.gov site (I guess we didn't "slashdot" it). I see a big clickmap style USA map image and just the feel of the responses makes me think the problem is not on rendering the view but on consulting the data model behind it. I suspect they have simply implemented it poorly and for all I know a little caching of database responses within their own web server and/or sending out a smarter web page with some smarts to render a smaller data push would help.
Good information presentation (Score:4, Informative)
I find that the weather.gov site has really excellent data presentation.
If your goal is to get weather information with a minimum of pushed videos, minimal on-page scripted cpu hogs, no advertising, and well-organized such that what you need most is easy to find at a glance, then the weather.gov site cannot be beat by any commercial source.
No commercial site could do this because their business model would depend on distracting the user from what they came for, in favor of the things that made money for the provider.
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Probably budgetary. OMB or the Congressional Budgetary Office is likely limiting their public facing IT spending, almost certainly for political reasons.
There's no shortage (Score:5, Informative)
There's no bandwidth shortage, they just don't want to fix it -- they admitted that it would only take $1.5M of their $5B budget to resolve.
The Weather Service held a public forum Tuesday to discuss the proposal and answer questions. When asked about the investment in computing infrastructure that would be required for these limits to not be necessary, agency officials said a one-time cost of about $1.5 million could avert rate limits. The NOAA budget for fiscal 2020 was $5.4 billion.
Re:There's no shortage (Score:4, Informative)
There's no bandwidth shortage, they just don't want to fix it -- they admitted that it would only take $1.5M of their $5B budget to resolve.
Be fair though, the monitoring they do with satellites, planes, boats, buoys, ground radar, etc... is super expensive. They may well be spending their entire budget on valid expenses and not be able to shake free $1.5M.
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But what would be the point of spending millions or billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars on real-time monitoring equipment like satellites and radar -- much of which is used to allow forecasters to warn the public of weather events like tornadoes -- if you can't disseminate the data to the public in real or near-real time?
And yes, NWS has its own forecasters who issue reports, but forecasting is subjective. Just look at this year's winter outlook published by the Washington Post [washingtonpost.com]: a 15-inch range in snowfall (l
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Re:There's no shortage (Score:5, Informative)
Expenses are controlled in entirely different ways in the private and public sectors.
If a private sector firm were confronted with this problem, some manager in the chain of command would look at his budget and take a little money from here and there to meet the need. As long as he met his overall spending goals, it's absolutely routine to do this.
In the US federal public sector, using money authorized for some purpose for any other purpose is a federal crime. You have to go back to Congress to get the new expense authorized. It's been that way since 1884, when the Antideficiency Act was passed. That was necessary because Presidents had long since found a way to circumvent Congressional budgetary power by simply using their spending discretion to spend all the money Congress budgeted. This produced a deficiency, and Congress would be forced to give the President even more money so things it actually wanted done could be done.
We've seen an example of that recently when Trump spent all the money Congress authorized on the wall. He invoked emergency wartime powers to move funds between military construction projects, even though the wall does not meet statutory definitions of a military construction project, which require the project to be under the control of a Secretary of one of the uniformed services. Arguably that is what they should have impeached him for.
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There's no bandwidth shortage, they just don't want to fix it -- they admitted that it would only take $1.5M of their $5B budget to resolve.
The Weather Service held a public forum Tuesday to discuss the proposal and answer questions. When asked about the investment in computing infrastructure that would be required for these limits to not be necessary, agency officials said a one-time cost of about $1.5 million could avert rate limits. The NOAA budget for fiscal 2020 was $5.4 billion.
1) They do not have enough delegated authority to move discretionary funding around and have to get Congress to approve the change;
2) They are such tightwads they expect additional funding to be provided, even though they will probably expend more $$$ in salaries for people writing all the doco needed to obtain and disperse funding.
No I do not accept they can't find $1.5M in $5.4B, though it may take a few to several months of the financial year to identify and consolidate unspent budget. Some GMs will n
The data is widely used. (Score:2)
The NOAA / NCEP weather data is widely used, many services depend on it, I am sure funding will be sorted for such a vital service. Shameless plug, but if you are into stargazing and have an iOS device, you might enjoy my (completely free) astro weather app called Xasteria [ecuadors.net] whose main data provider is 7Timer [7timer.info] is one of the many based on NCEP's GFS (with 7Timer adding calculation of astronomical seeing and transparency to the model).
Bogus! (Score:1)
Private weather services are just trying to take over and sell the info.
Oh well, another problem for Biden to fix, doubt he'll do it though
NOAA has a $5.35 billion budget (Score:2)
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... and they state that there would be a one-time cost of $1.5 million to fix the issue.
It's the government. They always want more tax money from you.
Re:NOAA has a $5.35 billion budget (Score:4, Interesting)
They've known this for quite some time, and have asked for the extra money to fix it for a couple of years, and of course Congress refuses that line item. This is a political issue, not a money or technology problem.
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Nope, it's illegal. They can budget for a new supercomputer or sensor network, but that's what the money needs to be used for.
60 connections per minute (Score:3)
This is dumb, and the devil is in the details but can anyone actually read.
The rate limiting would only impact users who use more than 60 connections per minute. Loading a web page should only use a couple of connections. So as a member of the public you would be pretty unlikely to hit these limits.
Essentially it sounds like some users have a business model with just throws the traffic back to the agency. These users should probably be caching data in the first place rather than offloading their computing processes onto Government Infrastructure.
Now limiting connections is easier said than done, many connections hide behind a single IP so that approach doesn't work for example in phone companies. Using cookies might work however if you are trying to stop the aforementioned sites they will just programmatically emulate a browser with cookies. So essentially they lock themselves into an arms race with these business providers,
A smarter approach would be to provide an API for these users and use this in conjunction with the other mechanisms, encouraging caching etc to reduce the load and provide the service. A smarter approach would be to provide this second channel over bittorrent with the assistance of those end users who are currently dossing them.
But this should be fixed by just providing a bigger pipe.. it's cheap
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A smarter approach would be to provide an API for these users and use this
https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api
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I guess AccuWeather wants to kill Weather Service (Score:4, Informative)
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> Former AccuWeather CEO Barry Lee Myers is in charge of NOAA. AccuWeather would like nothing more than kill off their FREE competitor.
Since you're already at 4 I'll let someone else give you the last plus, but there's a critical piece missing in your comment: he may technically be the "former" CEO, but he and his family *still own AccuWeather*. There is a HUGE conflict of interest here, with him in a position to further increase his personal wealth by sabotaging aspects of NOAA.
Note that he doesn't want
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Sharpie (Score:2)
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say what??? (Score:2)
They create the information in order to keep the public informed but complain because the public is accessing it in order to keep informed? I give up trying to understand them...
Re:say what??? (Score:4, Informative)
Not the general public, but the commercial providers who hit their site hard to scrape all the free data they can get. It's a political issue, they've been asking for the paltry sums to upgrade their pipe for years but it's eternally blocked in Congress.
How it works (Score:4, Interesting)
First these apps probably poll NOAA multiple times a minute. If one ever read NOAA TOC, you will see the forecasts for each regon is updated *once* per hour. So these apps and other sites poll NOAA something like once every minute or 2 (some a few times a minute).
In the old days gkrellm and wmweather would have defaults to poll NOAA something like every 5 minutes. Who knows what these Cell Phone apps do. Nevermind people preessing refresh like an lab animal pressing a colored button for a treat.
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Scam (Score:2)
Almost assuredly under financial pressure from the private companies who re-sell our public owned data for profit when it should be free.