A widespread weather reporting outage affected Alaska Monday, causing dozens of stations used by pilots and forecasters to go offline. No flight cancellations were immediately reported.
More than 50 weather stations across the state were offline, which is just under a third of the entire network, said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“This is a particularly bad day of a problem that's been going on for years with these weather stations,” Thoman said.
Automated Weather Observing Systems measure and broadcast weather data, such as wind, precipitation and visibility. Pilots use that data to plan flights and get clearance to take off. Thoman said that on any given day in Alaska, up to 20 of these stations are not reporting.
The stations are owned and operated by the Federal Aviation Administration, National Weather Service and the U.S. Department of Defense. Thoman says that Monday’s outage mostly affected the FAA stations.
The FAA did not immediately respond to questions about the outage.
Thoman said the the cause of the outage, which started around 10 a.m. on Monday, wasn’t known, but it was most likely due to a communication problem at a central location.
Adam White, who heads the government and legislative affairs program for the aviation nonprofit Alaska Airmen's Association, said that Alaska doesn’t have enough weather stations to begin with, and a massive outage like this makes it even harder to plan flights.
“This just shows how fragile the system is, and how dependent we are on having that data to be able to make good choices as far as weather-based decisions to go flying,” he said.
White said he is not aware of any flight cancellations. An Alaska Airlines spokesman said in an email Monday that the outage did not affect the carrier.
By Monday afternoon, the number of stations offline was down to just over 20. Thoman said that’s still slightly higher than normal, but the situation has improved significantly.
