Last night at about 1am the government's weather satellite GOES-8 had to be shut down due to a malfunction. This has caused a large data outage to all television and Internet providers for US satellite pictures. Those who are able to have substituted GOES-10 data onto their satellite maps. This is fine until you get off the East Coast of the US where the data stretches considerably. For examples of the areas covered to illustrate this situation see http://wwwghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/GOES [Note - I got to this site at 7pm but can no longer - if it's down, try again later] Click on the GOES-10 areas to access satellites for Hurricane Mitch if you cannot find them elsewhere. The major sites such as accuweather.com and intellicast.com are using GOES-10 data on their maps tonight so the outage is not a complete blackout for the US. The first attempt to restart GOES-8 was to be this evening at 6pm however I have not yet heard of the outcome. This is a very unfortunate outage as we will lose a great deal of research that could have been done on Hurricane Mitch, along with a slowdown in the forecasting process for this great storm. If GOES-8 cannot be recovered I assume that GOES-10 will be shifted over to cover the U.S. For a detailed explanation of last night's outage, see http://www.weatherwatchers.org/tropical/1998/13/g8.txt http://140.90.207.25:8080/EBB/ml/specialbull.html The latter URL should provide updates to the status. -- ============================================================== Jesse Ferrell - Meteorologist/Web Dev. - j{at}weatherwatchers.org Central Atlantic Storm Investigators - www.weatherwatchers.org "And here a twister comes... here comes the twister." --Talking Heads || ICQ No. 136832 ||