Your Connection Has Been Blocked
Due To NWS’s Abusive User Policy
Public Notice of Appropriate Use (Defining Abuse)
Below are guidelines for the use of all NWS websites:
The NWS has a dedicated mission to provide all users access to information for the protection of life and property and enhancement of the national economy. There are numerous Information Technology resources across the NWS that provide information across different interfaces. We have a responsibility to protect the integrity of these systems and maintain the boundary of any resource limitations. We are constantly monitoring those IT limits and adjusting thresholds that define the abusive usage policy.
Sometimes the NWS determines that a particular user is impacting our service delivery capability. This is rarely malicious, however to protect our resources and our service level to the greater user community we may find it necessary to block IP addresses or query types. Users who find that their queries are blocked should send an email to sdm@noaa.gov. Our IT professionals are happy to work with you to restore your service within the recommended guidelines that are outlined below.
- Know your data refresh frequency
- NWS has data which is updated at significantly different intervals. Knowing the frequency of the data update cycle will help you to create sensible request cycles.
- Example: If the forecast data is updated every 6 hours you should only make requests during those cycle output windows.
- Example: If you are querying a service for short fused warnings it may make sense to query our service once or twice a minute based upon your needs.
- Request only the data that you need
- NWS has many services that allow for the request of individual data sets and locations.
- React appropriately to return status and error codes
- If a Web Service isn't available users should limit the number of retries to 1 minute intervals.
- If a file is not available do not immediately retry the following second, pause for an appropriate interval based on your data refresh rate.
- Occasionally check your logs to ensure that you are not requesting invalid links
- NWS products are constantly updated/changed/decommissioned, check your logs to ensure that you are pulling valid data.
- Do not attempt any of the following or similar practices:
- Trojan Horse attack
- SQL Injection attack
- Cross Site Scripting attack
- Command Injection
- Remote File Inclusion
- PHP Script Injection
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