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Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

nco.ncep.noaa.gov

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Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#191

Post by gnarbarian »

sokoloff wrote: post #190
gnarbarian wrote: post #162

METARs are perpetually down. one funny thing about them, they are deemed to be a critical service which requires something like 99.99% uptime to be in compliance with the FAA regulations governing service delivery. to get around this, a METAR is considered up as long as it has power, regardless as to whether it itsproducing data or providing accurate readings. the technology was certified and frozen in the 90s. many…

A METAR* is the weather message, not the observation system (AWOS, ASOS, etc). * METeorological Aerodrome Report

yes you are correct.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#192

Post by gregsadetsky »

gnarbarian wrote: post #179
mayormcmatt wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very interested in this after reading your account, but couldn't find additional information online. Do you have sources we could look at?

https://medium.com/faa/faa-testing-new-system-to-increase-we... https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Thanks!

Cameras list/images: https://weathercams.faa.gov/

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#193

Post by alhirzel »

krisoft wrote: post #84
teeray wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated to aviation, but I actually find METARs and TAFs are useful for hiking and skiing. I use the altimeter settings for my altimeter when hiking, and knowing the altitude of cloud layers is useful to know what the visibility will be like on the mountain (you have to do a bit of math with the airport elevation and the mountain’s elevation, but hey—it works!).

I used METAR for running, or rather to say which days I'm allowed to not run. I noticed that when the day was long, and I was feeling tired and lazy it was a lot easier to find some excuse why not to run that day. This excuse was often the weather. But on the other hand I didn't want to say no matter the weather I must run, because that is obviously excessive. So I made up a simple "algorithm" to decide if the weathe…

Cool idea, what's your algorithm's decision criteria?

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#194

Post by kube-system »

gojomo wrote: post #185
kube-system wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of reason do you have to believe that sabotage is involved, when it is adequately explained by the positive feedback loop of out-of-position calls exceeding the rate at which the can be answered?

Why do you think I believe it was definitiely involved? I just don't think it's ruled-out by the simple official story. Some but not all of the reasons why I believe there might be more to the story are based on decades of life experience: * Whenever the media reports on something I know about intimately, they get it wrong, preferring pleasing simple narratives to the full details. Hence, I assume their stories on th…

Nothing we know about anything rules out the possibility that we might later learn something new that shows differently. But we can only make informed decisions based on what we do know, because the unknown is infinite. In the end, most occurrences in the world are just as plain as they appear.

> So, only the naive would rule it out entirely based on only self-serving public narratives.

I don't technically disagree, but it is also just as naive to ignore our human proportionality bias and discount the relative probability of the available evidence.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#195

Post by joezydeco »

tjohns wrote: post #165
snuxoll wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That automated weather frequency relies on METAR data from the Aviation Weather Service here in the US, and that's where ATC gets their information from as well when they're advising pilots of surface winds when giving landing clearance. Per the source, 167 airport weather stations are not reporting correctly (either due to a highly unlikely concurrent fault with the stations, or more likely an issue with the system…

You have it backwards, ATIS doesn't pull from METARs... the METAR and ATIS recording are both produced at the same time locally by the local weather observer (usually a controller in the tower), reading raw data directly from the on-field weather station and making manual edits as necessary. The two should match up exactly, but that's because they're both produced by the same process. If the tower is closed, or it's…

And, if the tower is open, you have to acknowledge the latest ATIS report (by signifying the revision) before you can go.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#196

Post by binkHN »

gnarbarian wrote: post #162

METARs are perpetually down. one funny thing about them, they are deemed to be a critical service which requires something like 99.99% uptime to be in compliance with the FAA regulations governing service delivery. to get around this, a METAR is considered up as long as it has power, regardless as to whether it itsproducing data or providing accurate readings. the technology was certified and frozen in the 90s. many…

> many of these devices are running windows 3.1 for networking!

Woah. Really?

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#197

Post by kylehotchkiss »

mshake2 wrote: post #180
gnarbarian wrote: post #162

METARs are perpetually down. one funny thing about them, they are deemed to be a critical service which requires something like 99.99% uptime to be in compliance with the FAA regulations governing service delivery. to get around this, a METAR is considered up as long as it has power, regardless as to whether it itsproducing data or providing accurate readings. the technology was certified and frozen in the 90s. many…

At this point I'm just waiting for the country to collapse under bureaucracy.

It's not that USA is doing incredibly well with bureaucracy, it's that everybody else is doing worse for one reason or another

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#198

Post by guhidalg »

mshake2 wrote: post #180
gnarbarian wrote: post #162

METARs are perpetually down. one funny thing about them, they are deemed to be a critical service which requires something like 99.99% uptime to be in compliance with the FAA regulations governing service delivery. to get around this, a METAR is considered up as long as it has power, regardless as to whether it itsproducing data or providing accurate readings. the technology was certified and frozen in the 90s. many…

At this point I'm just waiting for the country to collapse under bureaucracy.

View it from the other side: even with this much dysfunction, things work most of the time and when they fail they are recoverable. There's no motivation to improve until something fails hard enough. If no one crashes as a result of this METAR outage, I predict nothing will change.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#199

Post by butlerm »

ceejayoz wrote: post #58
SamPatt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a conversative. Presidents don't pass budgets. FAA funding has increased, not decreased. I can criticize my government all I want. You're turning this into a political party thing when it's a government service failure.

Presidents propose budgets (the CBO even uses the term "the President's budget"; https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58417 ), sign them into law, threaten Congress with vetos, and have significant influence over their party as a whole. Trump in particular was successful in drubbing opponents out of office; Liz Cheney went from #3 in House leadership to a pariah largely overnight.

A budget from the executive branch is just a recommendation. Congress might use use it as a starting point, if they bother to pass a budget at all, which they are not in the habit of doing lately unfortunately.

As far as Cheney is concerned, Trump had been out of office for months by the time she lost her leadership position. Anything he did was from the sidelines by that point.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#200

Post by dragonwriter »

butlerm wrote: post #199
ceejayoz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presidents propose budgets (the CBO even uses the term "the President's budget"; https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58417 ), sign them into law, threaten Congress with vetos, and have significant influence over their party as a whole. Trump in particular was successful in drubbing opponents out of office; Liz Cheney went from #3 in House leadership to a pariah largely overnight.

A budget from the executive branch is just a recommendation. Congress might use use it as a starting point, if they bother to pass a budget at all, which they are not in the habit of doing lately unfortunately. As far as Cheney is concerned, Trump had been out of office for months by the time she lost her leadership position. Anything he did was from the sidelines by that point.

> Congress might use use it as a starting point, if they bother to pass a budget at all, which they are not in the habit of doing lately unfortunately.

A budget is a budget even if it is neither comprehensive (i.e., all functions in one bill) nor for a full fiscal year at a time nor uses the word “budget” in its title.

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