NEW ORLEANS — The National Weather Service in New Orleans reports that its radar is back online after a network issue took it offline for about two hours on Wednesday.
As severe weather warnings started rolling in, the National Weather Service had a problem, it couldn't transmit the data from it's radar to anyone outside the weather service itself.
NWS says they lost internet and couldn't feed out radar updates.
Meteorologist with NWS Lauren Nash said, "Just like you guys have your own internet, so do we here at the National Weather Service."
Between 10:15 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. radar at the National Weather Service went down. The WWL Louisiana weather experts use these radars to give you the most accurate and up to date weather information. NWS says the connection to radars across South Louisiana went down, including, Hammond, Fort Polk and Lake Charles, as well as the airport weather radar.
WWL Meteorologist Alexa Triscler says she was still able to track the dangerous storm thanks to a powerful doppler radar in Mobile, Alabama.
"Everything was fine and then all of a sudden the radar went down you could see the images on the screen you could see the red, yellow green and then all of sudden it was blank," said Triscler.
She went on to say, "When the radar site is farther away, sometimes the wind rotation gets distorted, it's harder to detect so it's hard to see where exactly the trouble storm is."
Nash says internally they had no issue seeing the radar, saying, "We were still able to process that data, look at the data and help our offices make good choices, like good warnings."
She says alerts to mobile phones should not have been impacted. She says if you didn't get the alerts and you know you were in an area that got weather warnings today, to make sure your emergency alerts are turned on and check with your service provider that there wasn't an issue.
► Get breaking news from your neighborhood delivered directly to you by downloading the new FREE WWL-TV News app now in the IOS App Store or Google Play.