Prolonged Downtime for Server Upgrades
Consider the following famous quote from "What is a Good Forecast?" by Murphy (1993): "It should be understood that forecasts possess no intrinsic value. They acquire value through their ability to influence decisions made by users of the forecast." One possible interpretation of this is that an accurate forecast alone is insufficient, if not communicated well and implemented by the end users.
This concept can be applied even more broadly in meteorology. To make a good weather forecast, forecasters often need good tools, whether for observations or forecast model data. These tools can consist of the academic/research sector developing the methods, and computer programmers implementing them into user-friendly tools. In turn, the researchers and programmers need sufficient computing resources, especially if some of the analyses are computationally expensive. And maintenance is an important component as well – even the best server will need to be maintained to fix problems and upgrade to newer operating systems and packages.
The server that hosts this website – as well as PolarWx, and Steven Cavallo's website – is part of the Arctic and Antarctic Atmospheric Research Group (AAARG) research server. Our server had been scheduled for an upgrade, but unfortunately not every upgrade goes 100% smoothly on the technical side. Fortunately our department's IT has dedicated a lot of their time to get the server up and running again, and their efforts are greatly appreciated – PolarWx is now back online, with the underlying model plots running off of a brand new Python 3.10.5 environment.
This experience has been illustrative of the importance of IT in meteorology, especially given the computing needs whether for research or data visualization. This will be the subject of a future blog post; the rest of this post focuses on the current status of my website.
PolarWx preview of the newest addition of GOES-16 water vapor imagery.