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Re: McIDAS Imagery Gone (fwd)


===============================================================================
Robb Kambic                                Unidata Program Center
Software Engineer III                      Univ. Corp for Atmospheric Research
address@hidden             WWW: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 09:59:02 -0500
From: Chad Johnson <address@hidden>
To: Jim Koermer <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: McIDAS Imagery Gone

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 ...

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
improvements 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 andkeep 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