Fs global real weather xplane upgrade#

In which we miss a NOAA systems upgradeД®ffective on or about March 22, 2021, beginning with the 1200 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) run, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) will upgrade the GFS and Global Data Assimilation System (GDAS) from version 15.3 to 16.0. In fact, what had happened was a longer-term problem, and the outage was, at most, only part of the cause of the disruption we were seeing. Naturally, we initially assumed this was the cause of the problem, and our efforts were mainly aimed at mitigating the harm of a temporary outage, not dealing with a longer-term problem. Investigation into the causes of the missing data was sidetracked for a little while because, right around the same time, NOAA happened to suffer a widely-reported, significant disruption to their networks and server operations. The server may have suffered a silent crash-and-restart some time after NOAA stopped serving the file. The root cause of that data being absent from cache hasnвЂ™t been tracked down, for the reason that that part of the system has been replaced (see below). Further investigation revealed that only one of the three files it needed was both missing from its local cache, and unavailable from NOAA. This was a little surprising since our weather server is supposed to cache the latest data it received, even if itвЂ™s outdated, to smooth over any connectivity or availability issues with NOAAвЂ™s servers. X-Plane began reporting that it couldnвЂ™t fetch all the data it needed for real-world weather. Internally, we tend to refer to this system, overall, as Live Weather, or, in the context of anything server-related, just Weather.ДЄround March 22nd, it broke down.

That server, in turn, periodically fetches three total files from two different sources at NOAA: one for METAR-format weather condition data, and another source for two grib2-format files describing, separately, winds and turbulence. It does this by downloading weather report data from a server, operated by Laminar Research. X-Plane can be configured to model real-world weather conditions.