Our site is currently being hit with 30,000 requests per hour hitting the same pages in our recon system, mostly the same recon missions on Erin. It may be a Python script doing it. We're trying to mitigate it & you may be asked to solve a CAPTCHA challenge from Cloudflare before accessing the site.
Aug 27, 2025 21:11There have been 3.9 million requests in the past 24 hours and 11.5 million in the past 7 days. We have moved most of the content on the site so that it is no longer accessible. Some of the content will hopefully return later in the year while some will likely return in 2026 or 2027.
There was also an unusual amount of traffic downloading large model wind swath files this month in the model system. As a result all older Atlantic content in that system will not return until at least next year when data will be delivered in a different way that hopefully uses a lot less bandwidth.
Some of our other content may also be removed, at least temporarily. Other sitewide changes may be needed over the next year or so to be make sure the results of something like this has less impact.
So that we more easily notice issues happening across all of our Tropical Globe sites, all content may be moved & consolidated to that site. That would allow certain resources, like large scripts that are duplicated across sites, to be downloaded only once rather than per site duplicating bandwidth.
The mitigation is working. The model system is loading as normal rather than experiencing a delay of about 15 to 20 seconds. But again, data before 2005 in the model system will not be added back until the system is redesigned next year. (to reduce file sizes & change the way data is downloaded)
The recon system will remain removed for now. We might rename the main file used to view data in the next week so that the old location doesn't try to load data again if we add it back and the script that is trying to download hasn't stopped.
As a note for the future, our site is not designed to be a repository that people check for data with automated scripts. We can't handle that kind of load. We will be redesigning things to help mitigate future incidents, but we still won't have the capability to act as that kind of repository.
