Ticker for July 24, 2000

                
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July 24, 2000      July 24, 2000      July 24, 2000      July 24, 2000


A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM THE OKLAHOMA MESONETWORK

Due to a necessary upgrade of the Oklahoma Mesonet's communication
and archival infrastructure, some data will be unavailable in real
time during the coming weeks.

The Mesonet's data transmission between weather stations and the
Norman archive facility is possible through a valuable partnership
with the Oklahoma Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (OLETS).
Each participating OLETS base station handles weather data from one
or more Mesonet stations.

Because OLETS is changing their standard protocol for network
transmissions, the Mesonet is forced to change to a new data
collection software package that is compatible with the new OLETS
standards.  Thankfully, OLETS has allowed Mesonet to operate its
new and its old software in parallel, which has allowed Mesonet
personnel to prepare for the coming changeover without affecting
data availablility.

However, the final conversion to the new data collection protocol
must take place on almost a station-by-station basis.  These
changeovers must be done methodically, on location, and in concert
with OLETS staff, which means that they may take several days per
OLETS base station.

What this means for the Mesonet end user is that between now and
October there will be times when data from certain stations are not
available in real time and these periods could last for days or
longer.  This has already occurred at the OLETS bases that serve
the Fairview, Calvin and Medford sites.  These data outages will
travel around the network over the coming weeks, and no extended
network-wide data outage is expected.  The data at affected stations
will be retrieved on a daily basis, and the final archive should be
complete.

A changeover as complex as what is about to occur will no doubt
result in several periods when data from a specific group of
stations will be unavailable in real time, but this is the price
that must be paid to move to a new technology and keep improving
the Mesonet communications infrastructure.  We will make every
effort to minimize the amount of real-time down-time.