Radar outage causes problems tracking severe weather Tuesday morning

During the peak of storms that spawned tornadoes across Missouri on Tuesday morning, April 2, the National Weather Service’s live radar network went dark.

Meteorologists trying to warn viewers of imminent danger were handcuffed by a widespread network error at the National Weather Service data center in College Park, Maryland.

The NWS, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, issued a statement saying the disruption lasted more than five hours. NOAA is still unsure of what caused the outage.

The warning and radar disruption affected KFVS12 meteorologist Grant Dade, who was using different technology on his smartphone to inform viewers of the potential of a tornado and its possible path. Dade, aided by meteorologist Madeline Parker off camera, could only speculate when informing viewers about the storm’s direction as it appeared a tornado might be heading toward Benton. Dade mentioned numerous times that he was limited by the inability to use the NWS radar, and could only estimate based on the speed of the storms and rotation shown on radar up to six minutes earlier.

The same problem affected St. Louis. Meteorologists from the NBC affiliate said they were forced to track the storm’s movement by lightning strikes alone late Monday, April 1, and into Tuesday morning, according to ksdk.com.

The St. Louis Fox affiliate reported on its website that “around 12:25 a.m., the NWS lost all ability to push out their warning and forecast products, eventually trickling down to the radar products." The Fox affiliate reported that none of the region’s radar sites in St. Louis was operating and only 25% were operating nationally.

Fox 2 reported that meteorologists at the NWS office in Kansas City were putting hand-drawn maps in chat pages with Fox 2 meteorologists as an alternative communication method.

Sam Herndon, the Cape Girardeau County emergency management director, said the office was able to keep in contact with the NWS through a chat site group, plus could receive all the NWS alerts. Based on that information, Herndon said, they could sound alarms in Jackson and Cape Girardeau.

While NWS spokesman Michael Musher said the NWS was not making officials available for interviews on the outage, he confirmed that the Kansas City office also helped the weather forecast office in Paducah, Kentucky, to issue warnings.

“That is what is great about our agency, if one office goes down to unforeseen circumstances, or in this case network issues, a neighboring office steps in to assist without a beat,” Musher said. “It’s just another example of how the NWS is transforming, to be a more nimble and flexible agency providing key decision support services when needed."

In its official statement, NOAA acknowledged “some warning services were impacted. The NWS IT team mitigated the issue by moving network services from our data center in College Park, Maryland to Boulder, Colorado and operations were back to normal as of 6:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday morning with watches and warnings going out. We are working with the vendor to identify the root cause of the outage.”

On its radar web page, the NWS stated, “​​The newly rolled out radar.weather.gov page is experiencing unexpected performance issues. The national technicians that maintain the pages are aware of the problems and a software patch is planned sometime today to hopefully address many of the issues over the past couple of days.

"We apologize for any inconvenience and ask you to bear with us while they work on the problems.”

The outage has drawn national media attention.

The Washington Post reported on the recent outage, but also noted that smaller outages occur almost monthly. The Post reported that about 50 tornado and thunderstorm warnings were issued in the midst of the outage.

In the NWS 10-year strategic plan published in 2023, one of the organization’s main goals was to “improve our infrastructure to be resilient and reliable.” Among the points under the goal was to improve NWS IT infrastructure, governance and implement cloud-based solutions. Another goal stated the NWS wanted to “begin development of the next generation U.S. observing systems, including weather and water automated observations, climate observations, and radar, to ensure the quality and timeliness of storm warnings for communities through collaboration with our enterprise partners.”