Tornado and Severe Thunderstorm Watches originate with the SPC, the Storm Prediction Center. From there they are disseminated to the public along the NOAA Weather Wire Service. Earlier this morning Watches suddenly appeared throughout the country, as if the SPC were actually issuing them.
China apparently hacking the NWS this morning. Disregard these. RT @PaulPoteet: Tornado Watch for parts of Indiana until 3:00am.
— Paul Poteet Dot Com (@PaulPoteet) November 12, 2014
In that example I am re-tweeting one of the Watch postings that went out on my Twitter and Facebook feeds early in the morning. There are services (designed for the media and emergency planners) that instantly take that information and re-format it for quick posting on Social Media. I use one of those companies (ReadyWarn) to make sure I don’t miss anything concerning my area of coverage in Indiana.
ReadyWarn took the bogus info from the Weather Wire this morning and quickly does what it always does. (It usually is posting to my spaces just after my weather radio sounds.) So I appeared to be tweeting/Facebooking Tornado Watches earlier this morning. Sorry for any confusion.
So if the fake-SPC stuff didn’t come from the SPC….what happened? Here’s the later-morning explanation from the SPC:
The “CSC” is this place, a contractor based in Virginia. Guess I can’t blame this one on China.
UPDATE:
This is the word from ReadyWarn:
You may have experienced an issue this morning in which ReadyWarn posted invalid severe weather watches to your social media accounts. First, I want to apologize for this issue and the confusion and frustration it may have caused you and your audience. In the many years that we have been providing this service, this is the first time such an incident has occurred.
Immediately upon being notified of this issue, we identified a number of old alert products from 2010 being delivered to our ingest servers via our data providers. ReadyWarn tests incoming messages against messages that we have processed in the past to determine if they are new or not. Unfortunately, our current archive didn’t contain data from 2010 since we often purge older information from the system. As a result, the alerts were processed as new. To safeguard against a similar issue in the future, a new check was implemented this morning which discards any message with an expiration time prior to the current time.
At this time, it appears that an issue at the NWS resulted in the old data being distributed via a number of channels and this is what triggered our system to process the messages.
Once again, I sincerely apologize for this issue and want to reiterate that we have taken steps to safeguard against this type of situation in the future.
Sincerely,
Drew Smith
Versitell Communications | ReadyWarn
The glitch with false watches being transmitted is noted all over the country fwiw. This will all be solved when the FCC runs the Internet.
— Paul Poteet Dot Com (@PaulPoteet) November 12, 2014
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Paul Poteet says
My radio didn’t.