Bermuda Weather Service Website Restored
The Bermuda Weather Service [BWS] website www.weather.bm was restored last night following an outage that occurred on Monday during the passage of Hurricane Paulette.
Bermuda Airport Authority CEO, Lester Nelson said, “We are deeply concerned about the failure of the BWS website during this most critical period in hurricane season. We are working with our technicians and service providers to try to stabilise the website.
“We implemented our redundancy plan and used back-up communication distribution channels, such as our Facebook page to share important weather information with the public. We will continue to build on this.”
“BWS, was formerly operated by an overseas vendor under contract. At the expiration of the contract, BWS became a part of the Bermuda Airport Authority on 1 April 2019,” Mr. Nelson said,
“The Bermuda Airport Authority inherited ageing technology that needs to be replaced. We upgraded the Doppler weather radar system in July 2019, which along with increasing the scope of weather data is putting a strain on the ageing website platform.
“Over the past several months we have been assessing the BWS’ technology needs as part of a BWS strategic review and in the months ahead, we will be finalising our plans to rebuild and replace ageing technology.”
“The outage on Monday was initially caused by external infrastructure issues involving the fibre cable and internet service, however, when those issues were rectified, the website was not restored,” a spokesperson said,
“While we are planning to replace ageing technology, this challenge could not have come at a worse time.” Mr. Nelson said.
“At the moment the BWS site is live again but, as we look at the needs of next week we are concerned, and are putting into place additional redundancies so that BWS can share critical weather updates.
“This includes weather.bm and our BWS Facebook page. Should Hurricane Teddy become a threat to Bermuda, we will work closely with the EMO and its radio station 100.1 MHz to provide regular bulletins and updates and provide the media regular and timely reports.
“This is a very unfortunate situation, particularly given the professionalism of the BWS team who are highly qualified and work extremely hard to provide timely forecasts and information. We appreciate their efforts. We also want to thank Bermuda for the feedback we receive, and the community’s patience as we try to provide the best service we can, given this present difficulty,” Mr. Nelson said.
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