New and Upcoming NWS Web Page Changes

The National Weather Service has been working on updating its web presence.

Our current weather.gov site was built over many years and hosted on the NWS Information Dissemination System (NIDS) servers in Kansas City, MO and College Park, MD. This system has served reliably for many years, but is challenged by an aging infrastructure that is past its end of life and cannot be further supported after June 30, 2024. This out-of-date infrastructure leads to delayed site failovers and issues with overall site performance, especially during high-demand critical weather days. Extensive work has been done over the past year in order to transfer a large part of the web site to a more modernized and fully-redundant cloud setup, while work continues on a complete revamp of the overall web site.

So what has been done so far?

Example of 7-day forecast from the existing forecast pages

The individual forecast pages (for example, this is the page for Bloomington) have been moved to the new server. Functionally, it is largely the same as before, with the only noticeable changes being to remove some of the severely outdated page layouts for the local observations, 3-day history, and links to text products.

Full details, including any known issues and expected fixes, are listed at https://www.weather.gov/idp/forecastmigration. Questions about the changes can be emailed to nws.webfeedback@noaa.gov.

The graphical forecasts, also referred to as the National Digital Forecast Database, are now available in full resolution (up to 2.5 km), includes all forecast elements, and is interactive. Smaller images for low bandwidth users (using fixed sectors and selected time increments) are available at https://graphical.weather.gov/ . Forecast information is updated every 30 minutes.

And what else is coming?

By the end of June, the remainder of the current web site (https://www.weather.gov and the individual office subpages) will be moved to the new cloud service. The overall functionality will remain the same.
The Spanish-language forecast translation pages have being discontinued, and will be replaced by enhanced translation capabilities in the overall web page update. The NWS has begun providing alerts and forecast information experimentally in multiple languages at https://www.weather.gov/translate/ for selected locations (currently not in central Illinois, though this will be expanded over time).
The mobile.weather.gov web site is not supportable on the new infrastructure, and will be discontinued on June 30th. The revamped web site will be fully mobile-friendly. In the meantime, the individual forecast pages can be bookmarked, and are mobile-friendly.
The overall web site revamp is still in development. A sample of the forecast pages (seen below) can be found at https://beta.weather.gov/, along with overall information on the process. Updates are made every couple of weeks. Feedback on these pages is welcome, and can be submitted at the beta.weather.gov link.