E&E News: NWS experiences outages amid deadly floods and heat waves

The National Weather Service is experiencing a major data outage that will affect weather warnings during deadly Midwest floods and a widespread heat wave.

Problems began around 5:30 p.m. EDT on Monday and are ongoing, according to NWS.

"The outage has caused impacts to NWS operations, including degradation of forecast and warning dissemination, disruption of data flows, and sluggish websites,” said NWS in a statement. Initial investigations revealed that it was caused by a network hardware configuration issue.

Heavy rainfall in the Upper Midwest led to dam failures and flooding in Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska and Minnesota. More severe weather is forecast in the region for Tuesday.

Flooding in those states also coincides with excessive heat warnings, with multiple states under heat advisory across southern and central states.

As of midday Tuesday, 16 NWS transmitters remained out of service and five were degraded across Alaska, Tennessee, New York, Florida, Missouri, Kansas, New Mexico, Oregon and Texas.

NWS, which is a part of NOAA, said system engineers worked overnight to restore some functionality to the flow of weather forecasts and warnings.

In April, NWS scrambled to get tornado alerts out across the U.S. following an “intermittent hardware failure” that it said could be solved with a modest budget increase.

This is one of several NWS outages in the past few years.