Topic: Metars seem to have gone down

[satcop]

Not reading METARs at the moment.  My METAR pages come back with the following error on all METARs: unable to load KIAD data RC=  In this case KIAD but it is the same for all of them.  Also an undefined key warning (I assume because of no data) in the include metar.

Checked a few other PWS sites around the country and found similar results so this looks like either NWS changed something or there is some sort of outage.

Bob

[saratogaWX]

The note wit RC= usually indicates a connectivity issue from your webserver to tgftp.nws.noaa.gov site.  Could be DNS resolution, could be a routing issue, could be a firewall block by NWS if you've made too many requests in a period.

Running a view-source on your homepage with ?debug=y&force=1 showed:

<!-- mtr_conditions using METAR ICAO='KIAD' -->
<!-- curl fetching 'https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/stations/KIAD.TXT' -->
<!-- curl Error: Operation timed out after 6002 milliseconds with 0 bytes received -->
<!-- HTTP stats:  RC=0 dest=140.90.101.79 port=443 (from sce=50.87.144.89)
      Times: dns=0.001 conn=0.069 pxfer=0.204 get=5.799 total=6.003 secs -->
<!-- headers returned:

 -->
<!-- mtr_conditions returns RC='' for ICAO/METAR='KIAD' -->
<!-- CU_RainRateIcon in='unable to load KIAD data RC=' icon='5' rate='0.00' uom='in' -->

so it is a connection issue.  I suspect it is either routing or firewall at NWS site from you at 50.87.144.89 to them at 140.90.101.79.
Try asking nco.ops@noaa.gov if there is a firewall block for accesses from 50.87.144.89.

[saratogaWX]

Looks like I have the same issue on my site.
Timeouts.

Looking at https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/stations/KIAD.TXT gets a response after 17 seconds, so the server may just be overloaded.   I didn't see anything on the NCEP NCO activity list about an outage or slowdown for it.

[satcop]

Hi Ken;

Thanks for checking, I think they probably are having some issues at NOAA at the moment.  I had checked other sites including yours  earlier and found similar issues so I was fairly sure it wasn't local.  Lets see if it clears up over night.  My fear was they could have changed something and or missed some update.

Bob

[Jasiu / JJ]

I tested changing the $useMetarAPI variable to true. It gets me more recent info for some locations but not the most recent hour. Also api.weather.gov is having some serious response time issues. About half of the calls timed out (6 seconds). Of those that succeeded many took multiple seconds.

Going to check with the ops people to see if this is a known issue.

[Jasiu / JJ]

There is an open ticket for slow response both for the METAR data and the API. It's in much better shape this morning but I'm still seeing some multi-second response times for alerts/active endpoints.

[satcop]

Seems to be working again this morning, someone found the oil can and greased the bit generator.