The National Weather Service is considering applying limits to the amount of data requests users can make in order to prevent its systems from crashing during weather-related emergencies.
The NWS has experienced data delivery failures, website crashes, and other technological shortfalls for years during severe weather events, according to the Washington Post. Issues in the past have involved “hardware and software upgrades and security patch installations,” infrastructure changes, and “major supercomputer issues,” but now, the weather service is focusing on internet bandwith issues to prevent its systems from being overloaded.
“As demand for data continues to grow across [National Centers for Environmental Prediction] websites, we are proposing to put new limits into place to safeguard our web services,” NCEP acting Director Brian Gross wrote in a request for public comment dated Nov. 18.
“The frequency of how often these websites are accessed by the public has created limitations and infrastructure constraints,” Gross wrote. “To add new or upgraded streams of data, there has to be a reduction in the number of connections into our system. The mitigation will reduce the strain on our infrastructure, ensuring a more robust level of service for all users.”
One such limit would be to cap the number of connections from any given user to 60 per minute across NWS websites. Such a cap would apply to a range of NWS services, incluidng noaa.gov sites, weather.gov sites, and tsunami.gov.
Susan Buchannan, a spokeswoman for the weather service, told the Washington Post that the NWS is “challenged with bandwidth limitations as models and observations improve and data size increases.”
“User requests for data continue to increase and without imposing some type of mitigation, the bandwidth situation will worsen, potentially impacting a larger number of users,” Buchannan added.
Private weather companies have expressed concerns that the NWS’s request limits would “substantially harm the services they provide to customers.” AccuWeather Vice President Jonathan Porter said the caps would be detrimental to the timeliness and accuracy of forecasts during severe weather events.
In a similar vein, the NWS is looking to discontinue a number of warning update systems in an effort to consolidate alert systems and “streamline the warning update process.” Those processes include severe weather statements, tornado warnings, flood warnings, and other alerts.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the NWS for further comment.
