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It appears as though the National Weather Service has not updated any warning feeds for several hours. This is highly unusual to say the least and we have notified NWS of the problem and are awaiting a response. Considering what time of day, and in particular, what actual day it is, we might be waiting a while to hear back from them. We will update when the status changes or when we have additional details back from NWS.

UPDATE 10:41 am Saturday: NWS has contacted us and informed us that the problem with warning feeds is now being worked on with all due haste.  NWS has got to be the only government office anywhere in the world that you can reach on weekends. We will post new updates when they are available.

UPDATE 2 01:40: We were contaced about an hour ago by the NWS and notified that the source of the problem had been discovered.  Within the last five minutes we have noticed that some warning feeds are beginning to appear again.  We will continue to monitor the situation till we are ready to declare normalcy.

UPDATE 3 05:59pm: After a brief period of functionality all warning feeds are returning Mysql errors. As ususal, we have notified NWS again. In fact, we should probably just keep an open phone line between us. Any updates will be posted here.

UPDATE 4 09:44pm: After watching the observation feeds go down for about 3 hours, we have seen both the obs feeds return as well as the apparent stabilization of the wayward warning feeds.  We will continue to monitor all feeds a tad more closely than we normally do, but are hopeful this episode has finally been put to rest.

I really want to thank the entire team from the top on down over at the NWS data center for responding so rapidly on a weekend, a holiday weekend no less.  This sort of outage is rare over at NWS and those poor people have been overwhelmed with 2 serious episodes in less than one week. Anyone that thinks that all government jobs are cushy and populated with incompetent slobs has apparently never heard of the people that work for the National Weather Service.

They are grossly underpaid, and vastly underappreciated, but not so with the staff of Swas Inc.

Thanks,

—gisher

Observation feeds have been down for several hours now and the problem resides with the National Weather Service.  All warning feeds are working normally however and we have contacted the NWS and advised them of the problem. If there is any update on this matter we will post the information here. You can still obtain current observations by pulling up the last observation tweet sent out, and click on the link.  Only the NWS RSS feed server is down, not the observations html page we link to.

UPDATE (11:05 am est.): It appears that NWS has restored RSS observation feeds and your obs tweets should begin posting again on their normal cycle, provided that NWS does not experience additional issues.

UPDATE 2: It appears we jumped the shark because we lucked out and found several observation feeds restored, but have now confirmed that most of them are still experiencing an outage.

UPDATE 3: As of 5pm the vast majority of observations are reporting again via RSS.  Special thanks to the team over at NWS for responding so quickly to our notice, with what turned out to be a fairly major issue.

Many of you have not yet heard of PubSubHub, but at least one of our followers has. When we released the news about migrating our weather feeds to what may be the fastest weather warnings server available, it did not take long for someone to ask us,

“But are you as fast as PubSubHub is?”

The answer as of right now is yes we are faster than PubSubHub, but the devil is in the details. PubSubHub is a fairly new feed distribution system that is open source.  We looked PubSubHub over quite thoroughly before will built our new server and decided to make sure we could easily integrate PubSubHub into our system, but we also decided now was not the time to employ it. Why you may ask?

PubSubHub is wonderfully fast, and technically you could even get away with calling it a real time distribution system. There is however one problem we could not overlook with PubSubHub, and this major issue is that whomsoever is the source for the feeds has to be configured to send out a ping whenever they publish their feeds. That ping tells all servers that are monitoring for a specific ping that it is time to fetch a new feed.

Right now, a few people like WordPress have configured their servers to work with PubSubHub, but the National Weather Service is not a member of that “elite” group. You can write down what you had for breakfast on your WordPress blog and within a second or two, the entire world can rejoice in the news that you just consumed a bagel with cream cheese. What wonderful priorities some of us have.

I assure you that the day NWS offers PubSubHub, we will most likely be sitting there just waiting for NWS to flip the switch. I must also warn you about taking a weather feed served from any PubSubHub equipped server right now, assuming that the feed is really super, duper fast, because until the NWS starts sending out their own PubSubHub pings, the only way anyone can get a NWS weather feed is by fetching it first, just as we do right now.  That weather feed may have been sent to you by a PubSubHub enabled server, but the tooth fairy did not beam it to them, it had to be fetched, plain and simple.

We have worked very hard to build the fastest weather warning distribution system for NWS feeds, and the good news is, we can run our server faster than we are running it right now.  We need to complete further testing, but squeezing more speed out of our server should not be a problem. The better news is that when PubSubHub weather feeds are offered by the NWS we will happily switch our PubSubHub system on to receive it, and send it straight to you.

As a final note, we have completed the switch to our new server for all of our Twitter accounts that are still in testing mode, and today we switched a few accounts over that are actually assessable from our website. Please be patient, we estimate it will be at least two weeks before all accounts have been moved to the new server.

Starting today, we are switching our city and state feeds over to a new server, and you will receive a notice in your Twitter stream when your weather feed has been switched over to this new server. The result will not only mean your weather warnings are being delivered to your computer or phone much faster than they have been previous to the switch over, but faster than any other source for such feeds delivered from the Internet. We think that even people who have zero desire to socially interact on Twitter may find this shear speed of delivery compelling enough to finally obtain a Twitter account, and set the account to private.

The majority of Internet weather services distribute weather warning feeds to you in an average of minutes and this includes our own service, prior to switching over to the new server. This average varies anywhere from five minutes all the way to a perfectly useless, one hour or more, depending upon the provider. While you may occasionally receive an alert from our new server anywhere from one to roughly three minutes after the National Weather Service has posted that warning, you will quite frequently get your weather warnings sent to you in just seconds.

The observation feeds will still come out on average about once every hour, but that is because in most cases, the NWS only issues observations on an hourly basis. We prefer to use the observations from the National Weather Service because the standards in measurements that all NWS weather reporting stations must adhere to has no rival. What these means (in translation) is that the weather observations we send to you are very accurate.

The big change is now your weather warnings are not only accurate, but they are quite fast as well, and if you are distributing information about hazardous weather, one would think getting them to you as quickly as possible, would be your most important concern.

All cities and states should be moved over to our new server within the next three weeks, and as mentioned above, you will receive a notification in your Twitter stream once the change has taken effect. We are still working on the redesign of the pages that are linked to from each of our tweets, all of which now provide live Doppler radar. We are undertaking this effort to assure that those pages more assessable for all of our followers who obtain their alerts with a mobile phone. That upgrade should be ready for a rollout within one month from today.

Notice: A few cities were switched over ahead of schedule because changes made by the Boston National weather service office that coincided with an outage of OAUTH with Twitterfeed during their recent migration. SWAS Inc is not affiliated with or endorsed by the national weather service, and all feeds supplied to end users are obtained from the public domain, and were originally distributed by the National Weather Service to the public at large. Please be sure to rely on more than one source for emergency weather alerts.

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