NOAA’s environmental information hub working to ‘recoup data’ after Helene outage
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration component responsible for publicly sharing environmental and weather data and information said it has resumed ingesting data into a majority of its streams after an outage caused by Hurricane Helene.
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, which is located in Asheville, N.C. reiterated on Thursday that its staff and the data it holds, including paper and film records, were not harmed by the storm. It is, however, working “with data providers to recoup data that were not ingested while systems were down,” according to a press release.
NCEI expects that recouping that information could take up to three months, and while it’s working to recover as much as possible, the release said “some observations might eventually be unrecoverable.” The center directed people to its website to check for restored products and services.
The announcement comes after the office, which collects data from across NOAA’s portfolios, was knocked completely offline earlier this month by Helene, a Category 4 hurricane. In a release at the time, the NCEI said its headquarters had been “severely impacted” by the storm.
According to NCEI spokesman Jake Fortune, the storm disrupted all of NCEI’s ingest streams. Those outages “included raw data observations and value-added products and services that help the data be more useful for policy and decision makers,” he said. The office also previously noted that its State of the Climate data, which was scheduled to be released Oct. 8, would be delayed by the outage.
In the Thursday release, the office said it regained its connectivity “recently” and is working with facilities “in Colorado, Mississippi and Maryland to bring some system and data ingest capabilities back into operation.”
Fortune said in an email to FedScoop that “NCEI maintains 275 data ingest streams. 49% of these data ingest streams are on and operational, and 51% data ingest streams are in the process of restarting. We have also started recouping data not ingested during the outage on 39% of the data streams.”
While the office isn’t providing information when certain websites or products that were impacted will be available again, Fortune said the “entire team is working as diligently as possible to get those services back online and the list of what services will be available when is constantly evolving.”
