swas blog

Valid Monday, February 01, 2010 – Friday, February 12, 2010 Prepared by:
NWS CLIMATE PREDICTION CENTER CAMP SPRINGS MD

300 PM EST JANUARY 29 2010

* HEAVY PRECIPITATION FOR PARTS OF THE GULF COAST STATES AND SOUTHEAST, FEB 3-5.
* HEAVY PRECIPITATION FOR CALIFORNIA, FEB 4-7.
* MUCH BELOW NORMAL TEMPERATURES FOR MUCH OF NORTHERN ALASKA, FEB 3-7.
* ONGOING FLOODING FOR PORTIONS OF THE MIDDLE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY AND THE SOUTHEAST.
* SEVERE DROUGHT IN PARTS OF WISCONSIN, TEXAS, ARIZONA, NEVADA, CALIFORNIA, AND WASHINGTON. RELIEF EXPECTED LATER IN THE PERIOD FOR CALIFORNIA AND TEXAS.

DETAILED SUMMARY

We have completed the migration of our feeds to their new servers and basically what were already the fastest weather feeds in the world are now faster than they were two weeks ago. The slowest feeds now, which are allocated to cities with the lowest population levels, are fetched on an average of one minute and thirty seconds. We have also tripled the number of cities that are now fetched on an average of less than thirty seconds, and these changes were allocated based upon the highest population levels. In fact over 130 cities now join our state feeds with delivery times measured in the seconds.

It has been speculated that some online weather services deliver alerts within an average of five minutes. That said, we have been unable to confirm speeds anywhere close to this figure. We are aware that an outfit known as SuperFeedr guarantees the delivery of over 1000 feeds in less than 15 minutes. We are however certain that nobody comes remotely close to our one minute and thirty second times for our slowest feeds, much less, approaches our fastest times, which average less than thirty seconds.

NOAA has recently informed us that at the earliest, it will be sometime within the fall of 2010 before they add PubSubHub, or push alerts to their servers. This means that we will most likely add another round of speed increases in the coming months ahead, so stay tuned for more details on this matter. For now, if you want weather alerts delivered to your phone or computer as fast as possible, you need to utilize our service.

If you have never clicked on the links in our tweets we encourage you to do so at your next chance. When you do you will be directed to live Doppler radar along with additional details on alerts and observations along with zone maps and other details on the warning links.

In an unrelated note we have just added “Tweet This” to all of our blog posts so if you should find any of them interesting enough to Tweet, please do so, and we surely will appreciate your efforts.

Main Site

Cities in California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington were moved to the new, faster feed settings earlier this week and are all operating normally. We have just added the cities from sixteen more states, mostly from the eastern parts of the Midwest, and by next Friday all of our accounts slated for upgrades will be migrated to their new servers.

We are moving the migration at a much slower pace than was originally planned primarily because Twitter has been having some issues with excessive fail whales this week and we did not want to add to these existing complications. It is far more difficult to monitor results accurately to determine if your own servers are operating properly after a migration when you are simultaneously dealing with intermittent errors on Twitter’s side. We will update everyone with the full details next week when the migration is completed.

We have detected that parts of the National Weather Service’s site are down and have notified NWS immediately.  While some site functions are running, they are slugish at best and may affect the frequency of your alerts and some data may not display properly until this is corrected by NWS.

Update 10:51 am (est) The National Weather service has informed us they are looking into the source of the problem now.

Update 11:04 am (est) It appears that all of our site pages are pulling data from NWS, but are loading very slowly.  Still no word yet from NWS regarding their return to full capacity. Will update on feed status for Twitter as soon as we have confirmation.

Update 11: 11 am (est) We have confirmed our feeds are working and that we can now access most parts of the main site for NWS. We do not have an official “all clear” from NWS, or an explanation for the outage as of yet, but it appears that NWS has rapidly restored service.