Warm Weather Clobbers Climate Data Archive

The unseasonably warm weather across much of the country has meteorologists and weather enthusiasts searching for precedents - and doing so in large enough numbers that it caused an outage for a leading repository of historic weather data. The National Climatic Data Center, part of the NOAA network of government weather data sites, has experienced performance problems in recent days, according to Dr. Jeff Masters of Wunderground.

"The extremes section of the their web site has been down since last Friday, since their software has been unable to handle both the huge number of records being set and the huge demand from people wanting to see these records," writes Masters, the Director of Meteorology at Wunderground.com, on his popular WunderBlog. "The web site came back on-line this morning with software re-engineered to handle the load, but only with data through Sunday."