National Weather Service warnings were delayed before Iowa tornado

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A government computer system got bogged down during Saturday’s deadly central Iowa tornado outbreak, slowing down the flow of meteorologists’ warnings by several minutes.

National Weather Service spokesperson Susan Buchanan said in a statement that the agency’s systems slowed down because of an unrelated technical problem at a Texas office. The issue overloaded the agency’s network, causing a delay in the flow of messages in the minutes before the largest and deadliest of the tornadoes ripped through Winterset, leaving six dead.

Buchanan said the longest delay occurred at 4:11 p.m. Saturday, when a warning from the agency, telling residents to take cover, did not go through until 4:18 p.m.

According to the agency, over about 90 minutes from 4:26 p.m. to 6:01 p.m., the EF4 tornado tore 70 miles from southeast of Winterset through the south side of Des Moines and on to Newton. Winds topped out at 170 mph.

“The deadly tornado outbreak in Iowa on March 5 was heartbreaking, and our thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones,” Buchanan said.

Iowa State University systems analyst Daryl Herzmann, who tracks National Weather Service data, said the agency’s delays probably did not endanger residents, still giving them sufficient time to react — though he noted that the relatively slow development of the storm played a role in keeping the slowdown from becoming a critical issue.

Comparing the timestamps on the National Weather Service’s messages to the actual time they reached his computer, Herzmann said the agency sent its first delayed warning around 3:22 p.m. He estimates computer problems pushed back delivery about three minutes.

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While the delays got longer over the next hour, Herzmann said, the earlier messages would have reached the residents well before the storm did. The National Weather Services’ warnings were not delayed for weather radio listeners, and agency meteorologists spoke directly with their local TV station counterparts, who were tracking the storm live.

“I don’t think realistically it made a difference,” Herzmann said.

Buchanan said the agency’s warnings reached the average central Iowa resident 20 minutes before the storm did. Nationally, she said the agency’s average is 10 minutes.

She said the delay in messaging Saturday occurred because a fiber optic cable had been damaged at the agency’s Dallas-Fort Worth forecast office. She said workers at the office switched from a cable-based network to a satellite-based backup network, which field offices like the one in Des Moines use.

Adding the extra office to the network, combined with the fact that Midwestern offices were sending more notices because of the storm, “slowed down the queue of message transmissions,” Buchanan said.

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Slow development and long lifespan of twister likely helped mute delay’s impact

In a way, Herzmann said, the characteristics of Saturday’s storm prevented the computer system delay from causing worse damage.

The Winterset tornado developed relatively slowly, giving meteorologists plenty of time to warn residents. It also lasted an hour and a half, allowing residents elsewhere to prepare.

Other storms may come quickly, with little warning. A seven-minute delay in those scenarios could prevent residents from running to their basements or finding other shelter in time.

“It creates confusion in a situation where seconds count,” Herzmann said. “These type of situations should be completely avoidable by robust IT infrastructure.”

Rob Lightbown, a forecaster with Crown Weather Services, a commercial weather service, said the National Weather Service’s computer systems also failed during a weekend snow squall in New England. He said residents in eastern Massachusetts did not receive text warnings that the agency sent, though most people were at home because the storm occurred on a Sunday evening.

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He said most people do not notice when the National Weather Service’s computer systems go down, as the delays usually don’t happen during storms.

“Most times, it’s not a big deal,” Lightbown said. “It just delays a forecast or something. But Saturday, it was a problem. It went down at the worst possible time.”

According to the Washington Post, meteorologists have complained they have not been able to communicate during past tornadoes through NWS Chat, a messaging service that they use to disseminate information to partners like TV broadcasters.

In March 2021, meteorologists at the agency’s Birmingham, Alabama, office told TV station managers that they were going to abandon NWS Chat and instead use Slack, a commercial messaging software. A couple days later, according to the Post, National Weather Service leaders ordered all meteorologists to return to NWS Chat.

The agency’s chat service went down during two storms later that month, with Buchanan telling the Post that increased web traffic and flooding at a Maryland data center caused “intermittent slowness” and temporary outages.

Lightbown said meteorologists have advocated for more information technology funding for several years, while other experts have said the National Weather Service needs to partner with an outside cloud computing company, like Amazon Web Services or Google.

“Saturday’s incident might convince Congress to look at it more aggressively,” he said.

Tornado sirens fail to go off in Newton

In addition to the delays from the National Weather Services, residents in Newton didn’t hear tornado sirens before the storm hit their city Saturday evening.

City spokesperson Danielle Rogers said in an email that “it was determined” during a test last Wednesday that some sirens in town didn’t work. She did not say in her statement who made the determination.

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