Flooding Knocks NOAA Buoy Data Offline at NWS Headquarters

On Friday we brought you a “late news report” that the National Data Buoy Center’s (NDBC) primary processing servers had been shut off due to “a facilities issue.” The result was that NOAA’s ocean/marine buoy data were rendered inaccessible, and there was no available time frame in which the service would be restored. We have since learned that the outage was caused by flooding at the National Weather Service’s (NWS) Maryland headquarters.

According to a report on gCaptain, the flooding resulted from a burst pipe, which “caused extensive flooding” and damaged the servers located at the Silver Spring facility. Currently the building is being “dried out” while NOAA and building management assess the damage and form a plan to inspect and repair the damage to the building and restore the systems.

As the NDBC’s mission is to “provide quality observations in the marine environment in a safe and sustainable manner …” we hope the servers will be back on line quickly. In the meantime the advisory banner remains on the website: “On 03/09/2021 the NDBC primary processing servers were shut off due to a facilities issue. Station pages on the NDBC website are not updating and there is no ETR at this time. We will update this banner as we learn more.”