The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), a massive archive of data with its headquarters based in Asheville, North Carolina, has been offline for days in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
The website and data archive is inaccessible, and has been since Sunday, as spotted by climate journalist Michael Thomas.
I was going to NCEI's website for a story I'm working on about Hurricane Helene and America's increasingly fragile insurance system.
— Michael Thomas (@curious_founder) September 29, 2024
Public resources like this are essential to journalism and our understanding of the world. https://t.co/WHbJMVNBUL
The storm made landfall off Florida’s Gulf coast on Sept. 26 as a category 4 hurricane, and progressed through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina as a tropical storm. Asheville was one of the hardest-hit cities in the Southeast, with houses being literally swept away in the flood waters. Officials have described the damage as “biblical.”
Archives on the Wayback Machine show the NCEI website going offline on the evening of Sept. 27, around the time the storm reached Asheville. Dan Kowal, Standards and Evaluation Branch Chief at NCEI’s Chicago office, told 404 Media that the federal building where the agency is based is closed.
“The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) team is still working to account for all of its employees and staff, however, this is difficult due to the lack of reliable phone and internet connections. Even those who are physically safe are generally without power, water or connectivity,” Kowal said. “The NCEI Federal building in downtown Asheville has electricity, but not water, and the building will not be inhabited fully until that is resolved. The data center is currently shut down.”
NCEI’s network service provider is also down, Kowal said, and it will likely be several days before it’s restored.
The NCEI archive contains more than 60 petabytes of data, and collects that data from a wide variety of places, including forecasting and climate models, satellites, ocean buoys, remotely operated underwater vehicles, and weather balloons, and its scope spans from the ocean floor to the surface of the sun. It’s useful for researchers, but is also used on a practical scale by fisherman, farmers, manufacturers and the freight industry.
NCEI also hosts and operates the World Data Centers and Services for Geophysics, Meteorology, Oceanography, and Paleoclimatology, which “acquires, catalogs, and archives a discipline specific collection of datasets, and develops products and applications designed to meet the information needs of resource managers, policy makers, researchers, educators, and the general public around the world,” according to its website.
“Our thoughts are with the people across western North Carolina and all of those who will deal with disruptions in their community for a long time,” Kowal said.
Thomas wrote on his Substack that he’d downloaded the full list of billion dollar disasters from NCEI before the center went offline, and made the list available for other journalists and researchers. Helene is predicted to join that list.
