National Weather Service shares details on radar outages in Louisiana
Nov 14, 2024
SLIDELL, La. (WGNO) — Wednesday morning, Louisiana National Weather Service offices suffered severe radar outages that affected several sites, including Hammond, which covers New Orleans.
"It's just like your cable goes out, your satellite dish goes out, and that's basically what it was, so it's not anything on the national weather service side. It was a customer that we got through trying to get our internet out to the public," NWS Meteorologist Christopher Bannan said.
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The National Weather Service lost communications at around 9:45 a.m. and were able to connect once again at around 1 a.m. The team never lost internal access and continued to monitor activity throughout the outage.
"Basically, anything coming out of the office was impacted, however, we were still getting all radar data, all the satellite data and all the model data into the office," Bannan said.
Thankfully, the National Weather Service team was prepared for this issue and remained in contact with their back up office in Mobile, Alabama, in case a warning was needed.
"We have these procedures in place for anytime that we have any type of issues. Even if radars go down, there are other radars we can use, and we practice these basically every six months, and a lot of time we do training," Bannan said.
If this issue were to occur again, the National Weather Service team recommends to look at a nearby radar on their website instead.
"there's a radar in Jackson, Mississippi, one in Mobile, Lake Charles, and Fort Polk, so those are all the surrounding radars," Bannan said.