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Washington Post
From the Weather Service, Cloudy, Chance of Errors
By John F. Kelly
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page B08
Yesterday afternoon, the meteorologists at the National Weather Service's
Sterling forecast office were sitting around their Loudoun County digs.
With their eyes trained on their thermometers and anemometers and
barometers, not to mention their doppler radars, they had every reason to
believe that on the other side of the wall -- what weather experts call
"outside" -- conditions were clear.
So imagine their surprise when at 2:56 p.m. up popped on their computer
screens an urgent message that a winter storm warning -- with the prospect
of lake-effect snow -- had just been issued for the entire Washington area.
"Of course, everybody looked at each other and said, 'Who issued this?' "
said meteorologist Jim Travers.
They looked more closely: They had issued it.
Except they hadn't. The culprit was someone in the Weather Service's
Office of Science and Technology in Silver Spring who had accidentally
sent the world a test message -- plus a second one warning of an
approaching blizzard -- that was supposed to stay inside the building.
"We thought all of the systems that were capable of going live out of this
other facility where they do development had been disconnected, so that
this could not happen again," Travers said. "Well, I guess they found out
that something had not been disconnected."
It wouldn't have been so bad if the error could have been erased like a
misspelled word on a chalkboard. But the many tendrils of the Internet
allowed the goof to live on all afternoon. Travers said the phones started
ringing off the hook. In addition to the text warning, an online map
showed a purple blot from Lexington, Va., to the Maryland-Pennsylvania
line signifying the impending blizzard.
The warning didn't just pop up on the Sterling Web page. The wonders of
automation meant that it was also zipped to such private clients as
Accu-Weather and Weather Bug. Many of those customers have software that
automatically publicizes such alerts without any human looking to see if
they make sense.
Jack Hayes, director of the Office of Science and Technology, said bogus
messages have snuck out before. His office wrestles with the challenge of
getting weather hazard information out as quickly as possible. Any human
who had looked out the window would have known this warning was a mistake.
But humans can gum up the works when trying to issue lifesaving alerts.
"Any time you have a human [in the process], you introduce a delay in
getting an important warning out to the public," Hayes said.
Travers said it could have been worse. Most of the people who saw the
warning knew to discount it, he said, since the day was so clear. It would
have been worse if the area was in the middle of a weather event.
Besides, Travers said, "probably a goodly number of people in Washington
are fixated on Joe Gibbs coming back."
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