Weather Service faces bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data

Re:Weather Service faces bandwidth shortage, proposes limiti... by blakesterz on Thursday December 10, 2020 @12:01PM (#25375726)

Jonathan Porter, a vice president and general manager at the private forecasting firm AccuWeather, warns that the agency’s proposed solution would harm the timeliness and accuracy of forecasts and severe weather warnings. He said the collection, processing and distribution of weather information are the agency’s “most important services.”

That's an interesting quote coming from AccuWeather... https://citizentruth.org/the-politics-behind-the-movement-to...

"Richard Hirn, an employee who represents the National Weather Service’s Employee Organization, told Bloomberg, “We fear that he [Barry Lee Myers] wants to turn the weather service into a taxpayer-funded subsidiary of AccuWeather.”"

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Re:Weather Service faces bandwidth shortage, proposes limiti... by kevin_thibedeau on Thursday December 10, 2020 @12:20PM (#25375926)

AccuWeather is in the business of spreading FUD about the NWS. They are directly responsible for the current level of underfunding for their digital products.

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Re:Weather Service faces bandwidth shortage, proposes limiti... by brootstrap on Thursday December 10, 2020 @09:38PM (#25381619)

The headlines are misleading. The people leading the call actually said the problem was 'volume' of data. I heard them talk, i'm not sure they really know what is going on or understand the issue.

Also the problem isnt just weather.gov and weather API. Sites like accuweather are likely grabbing raw files from the FTP servers. Everytime a new forecast comes out (for say the GFS), all these people hit the server at same time to download gobs and gobs of data. Yall would be surprised at how much data in is weather prediction outputs!

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Re:Weather Service faces bandwidth shortage, proposes limiti... by rnantes on Thursday December 10, 2020 @10:39PM (#25382000)

The CEO of AccuWeather Barry Myers who Trump just appointed to head NWS/NOAA is essentially trying to privatize it. NOAA's API is horrible, slow, and you often have to resort to scraping the HTML because it leaves out data. Instead of rate limiting essential 3rd party services they need to rewrite the API and heavily rely on caching and a CDN. Sadly it looks like private money lobbying is ruining an amazing public good.

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