NOAA, meet Noah.
The website for the National Weather Service (NWS), which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), suffered a major malfunction on Thursday leading to the false appearance of a biblical flood warning spanning from Canada (which the NWS doesn't even have responsibility over) south to Florida, and west to Michigan.
The malfunction, which began around midday ET and was fixed by 3:15 pm ET, affected local NWS websites -- key conduits for disseminating life-saving watches and warnings.
The false alarm led to one tweet from the National Weather Service forecast office in Boston, which may prove to be one of the greatest dispatches in the history of the NWS.
Please disregard the giant flood warning presently across the entire Eastern U.S. We are currently experiencing webpage issues.— NWS Boston (@NWSBoston) April 10, 2014
In Boston, as well as New York City, the NWS websites showed a major flood warning in effect, yet skies were clear and conditions were so dry that a brush fire was burning in Edison, N.J., southwest of the city.
The situation was even more confusing in the Southeast, which experienced widespread flooding over the weekend. River flood warnings were still in effect in Alabama and other states, but it was difficult to pick those out from the maps on the NWS websites -- since they were covered in the green hue of NOAA's mysterious flood.
@EricHolthaus @NWSBoston @thekibosch I feel like this is gonna turn out to have been a promotion for #Noah.— Lily Hay Newman (@lilyhnewman) April 10, 2014
According to NWS spokeswoman Susan Buchanan, the website issue was traced to an incorrect coding within a real flood warning issued by a local NWS office. "One of our forecast offices issued a flood forecast with a corrupted latitude/longitude string, which caused the incorrect display of our national hazards map on weather.gov. The problem was brief, and has been fixed," she told Mashable in an email.
The latest website problem comes a week after NWS websites experienced server problems as a tornado outbreak got underway in the Mississippi River Valley. Those problems prevented some users from accessing NWS websites.
Smoke from the brush fire in Edison shows up clearly on KDIX radar, blowing northeast. pic.twitter.com/i05w55dzfu— NY Metro Weather (@nymetrowx) April 10, 2014