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19990830: McIDAS Imagery Gone

>From: Chad Johnson <address@hidden>
>Organization: SSEC
>Keywords: 199908301501.JAA10276 missing GOES imagery

Chad,

I want to thank you for your considered and patient reply to Jim
Koermer regarding yesterday's outage of GOES data in the
Unidata-Wisconsin datastream.  We greatly appreciate all that you folks
do there and the considerable extra effort that you make to keep things
running smoothly on holidays and weekends.  Unfortunately, we do not
have the funds to support 24x7 coverage in the SSEC data center.

I also especially appreciate you letting folks know that the missed
imagery is in the online Unidata-Wisconsin archive.  Those truely
interested in the meteorology of hurrican Dennis will undoubtedly go
back to the archive and back fill their data holdings.

Thanks once again,

Tom

Jim Koermer wrote:
>> It appears there is a problem with McIDAS area files. Here, the last
>> GOES-W data was 0500Z and GOES=E was 0315Z. From a quick check of a
>> number of other university web sites, this seems to be uniform, so I
>> think the problem is at SSEC.
>> 
>> With two Atlantic hurricanes, this is a really bad time for this to go
>> down. I wonder why an astute programmer at SSEC can't write a script to
>> do some automatic checking and restart some of their systems or send
>> some notification to the appropriate person when things go down. Just
>> when I was thinking how reliable the McIDAS feed has been for about the
>> past month, then ...

Chad Johnson replied:
>Our campus network folks performed some work yesterday morning. The outage
>was supposed to last 10 minutes, but they obviously ran into problems and
>the outage was considerably longer.
>
>It has been at least a year - quite possibly longer - since there was a
>problem with satellite data on the Unidata/Wisconsin broadcast which can
>be attributed to problems within the SSEC Data Center. Any recent data
>outages have been the result of outside influences such as campus and
>regional network problems and power outages.  Over the past couple of
>years, astute programmers have made many mprovements within the Data
>Center in both the real-time ingesting of satellite data and the
>Unidata/Wisconsin product production software that has greatly increased
>reliable delivery of products. The Data Center is not staffed 24 hours
>a day, 7 days a week. If Unidata is willing to support 24/7 staffing we
>will be happy to provide it. Efforts are made on weekends to deal with
>problems as they occur, but because we are not staffed at these times we
>simply may not know there is a problem.
>
>The product generation software continued to work flawlessly yesterday and
>all data is available in the nearline archive. The GOES-8 4:15 and 5:15
>images were cancelled due to Keep Out Zone. Information regarding cancelled
>images due to eclipse and Keep Out Zones is available at
>http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/SSD/GOES/eclipse.html, which is also referenced
>by the >SSEC Data Center home page at http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/datacenter.
>
>-Chad
>
>-- 
>Chad W. Johnson                           E-mail: address@hidden
>Programmer/Meteorologist                  Voice: (608) 265-5292
>Space Science and Engineering Center      Fax: (608) 263-6738
>University of Wisconsin -- Madison
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