National, Global Climate Data Not Available Due To Hurricane Helene in North Carolina.

The National Centers for Environmental Information
building in Asheville, North Carolina.  The structure and
its physical contents were not damaged in the storm,
but the disaster disrupted the flow of critical national
and global climate data used worldwide.

 Every month, almost like clockwork, I give you updates on how the previous month's United States and global temperatures compared to previous years.  

I do that because most months these days in the age of climate change end up being the warmest on record, or if not, somewhere in the top ten list. It's important to let people know these measures of how climate change is progressing.

These monthly updates are now delayed because of a weather event that was likely made worse by the very climate change all this data was tracking. 

NOAA's  National Centers for Environmental Information, which compiles all this detailed global climate data, is headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina. It's the world's largest environmental data center. 

As we know, Asheville was brutalized by the flooding from Hurricane Helene. Swaths of the city were inundated or even swept away by floodwaters. Power, internet and water were out for weeks, and still hasn't been fully restored. 

Because of all this, the U.S. September climate report, which was supposed to be released on September 8, and the global climate report, which was supposed to go out October 10, have been delayed and we still have no idea when we'll see these documents. 

That's not good, because these monthly climate reports are not just interesting to geeks like me. Both the private and public sectors use them, including organizations and governments involved in agriculture, energy, retail, reinsurance, transportation and media. 

Thankfully, nobody who works at NCEI was hurt in the disaster. The building itself is intact and computer systems and existing data were not lost.  Old archives on paper and film are also safe. 

The servers at NCEI need a big, powerful cooling system, which relied on Asheville municipal water to get the job done. Hurricane Helene cut off the municipal water supply, and just this week, only some of the first steps toward getting that supply flowing again have started.

NCEI has been scrambling to set up alternative cooling systems. 

As of Thursday, things were beginning to look up.  NCEI takes in a lot of data daily, and they were not able to do that for weeks. Most of the usual data had started coming in as of this week, as broadband internet connections have finally been restored.

However, they have to catch up with data that never arrived during the crisis, and they might never be able to recover some of that data,

I don't know to what extent that might degrade the quality of their climate reports, if at all. 

People use NCEI information and data streams to make the point we need to adapt for climate change, to adjust the way we do things. It appears NCEI will need to do the same.

It's likely too early to plan this out in earnest, but I imagine they will need to find a redundancy, some entity somewhere else that can act as a backup if something like this ever happens in Asheville again. 

Interestingly, according to WUNC, NCEI was relocated from New Orleans to Asheville in the 1950s. Asheville was chosen because it was closer to Washington DC and because it was thought to be a historically safe climate area,

So much for that idea.