While helping out a friend who is delivering a new to him boat down from San Francisco I came upon a startling discovery. One of the resources I use to help people in near real time with deliveries is the array of buoys maintained by NOAA and the National Buoy Data Center.
This morning at 4AM when I logged in I was stunned to discover that pretty much the entire array of buoys had no data available. The message in bold red letters at the top of the data page said words to the effect of: “the NBDC primary processing servers were shit off due to a facilities issue. There is no ETR as to when we may get the system functioning again.”
On the surface this may not seem like that big a deal…except guess where your data points come from for the various weather models? For those on the East Coast and middle of the country, less of a problem but for those on the west coast, you are now pretty much blind as even the ship data is gone. Rut Roh.
https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/
