Haven't seen much traffic here lately, but we have noticed with increasing frequency over past few months problems with IDD Difax from Alden. Many times calls to report problems or request backups are futile, as we don't always get a response to our phone/email queries, which usually come from our weather station manager.
At best, we seem to lose one complete upper air/model cycle per week, and often more than that. It often seems that Alden never gets the maps on their disk for backup and so we can never retrieve them. Difax is dying, I know...but for the time being it is still a service that is paid for. Are satellite users experiencing same kind of problems IDD users do? Is NWS having problems getting Difax products to Alden, so that they can't get them out to the Unidata sites? Are other IDD sites experiencing same kinds of data losses?
We'd appreciate some comments from other sites on this one...David Knight's
post helped prompt this request, and a visit to the IDD stats pages reveal that
we are not much worse off than other sites.
Paul Ruscher
