Local meteorologists left in the dark during NWS radar outage
ST. LOUIS – Every type of severe weather, including storms in the St. Louis area Monday, relies on radar feeds from the National Weather Service. However, major outages in the early hours of Tuesday caused a great deal of problems for area meteorologists.
While there is not yet an answer as to why these outages happened, all that is known is that the source for warning systems fell silent.
Around 12:25 a.m., the NWS lost all ability to push out their warning and forecast products, eventually trickling down to the radar products. Below are screenshots of what a normal radar network page would look like compared to what was shown last night.
The green indicates radar sites that are operating normally, and the red means they have been down for 30 minutes or longer.
Normal radar network page Monday night/Tuesday mornings radar network page
Only 7% of our central region’s radar sites were working, with none operating in St. Louis. On a national level, only 25% of them were online.
Operations were normal during the first round of storms that arrived around 5 p.m. Monday. All the hail, wind and tornadic rotations within clouds could be seen on the radar during this round.
The outage came at the worst time in the second round of storms, as the weather intensified and potential tornadoes could not be seen with the naked eye.
FOX 2 reached out to NWS St. Louis, who redirected us to national headquarters. They sent the following statement:
“The National Weather Service experienced a network outage that impacted multiple forecast offices across the country overnight. The outage occurred over 5 hours. During this outage, some warning services were impacted. The NWS IT team mitigated the issue by moving network services from our data center in College Park, Maryland, to Boulder, Colorado, and operations were back to normal as of 6:30 a.m. EDT today; watches and warnings are going out. We are working with the vendor to identify the root cause of the outage.”
The NWS St. Louis and FOX 2 work hand in hand consistently during severe weather. Some operations shifted to Kansas City, issuing warnings from across the state.
At one point, those in Kansas City were hand-drawing maps to put in a chat page with FOX 2 meteorologists on where the warnings were, and the information was then relayed to the public.
The cause of the outage remains unknown.
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