What’s happening

The archive’s office is located in Asheville, which was perhaps the hardest hit by the hurricane. The storm reached a Category 4 storm, causing collapsed homes and rooftop flooding, leaving people unable to evacuate without electricity, communications and other basic needs.

The NCEI site went down on the evening of Sept. 27, around the time the storm reached Asheville, according to data available online. The head of standards and assessment at NCEI’s Chicago office said the federal building where the agency is located is closed, but the full impact is unknown.

The team at NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information is still working to locate all of its employees and staff, but this has been difficult due to the lack of reliable phone and internet connections. Even those who are physically safe often have no electricity, water or communications.
he says.

NCEI’s network service provider is also down. It will probably take a few days to restore. This fact may be the main reason why the archive is not online, but since no one can say for sure at this point, there remains the possibility that the building was flooded by servers or damaged by a hurricane.

The NCEI archive contains more than 60 petabytes of data over many years. It collects them from a wide variety of sources, including forecasts and climate models, satellites, ocean buoys, remote-controlled underwater vehicles and weather balloons, and application range extends from the ocean floor to the surface of the Sun. It is useful for researchers but is also used in practice by fishermen, farmers, manufacturers and the transportation industry. Apparently their data is also used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); Thanks to this, we can learn about space weather, magnetic storms, solar flares and more.

NCEI also hosts and operates the World Geophysics, Meteorology, Oceanography, and Paleoclimatology Data Centers and Services, which “collect, catalog, and archive discipline-specific data collections and develop products and applications designed to meet the information needs of resource managers, policy makers, researchers, and educators.” and the general public worldwide.” The organization itself describes its work this way on its website, which can currently only be found at the Internet Archive but not online.

No one can say right now how long it will take to learn all the conditions and then deal with the consequences.