Yep. I was trying to get SkewTLogPro to work and it threw an error, and one of the parts of the error was "or the server may be down, which is beyond our control." So I went to the main web site and got redirected to governmentshutdown.noaa.gov.
Hmm. That's cool, I hadn't really seen the actual soundings before.
The Plymouth site appears to be down, though, when I went to submit the form i just got a blank page back. Unsure if that's related to the shutdown or not.
IME, the briefers are pretty worthless when it comes to this sort of thing. They know nothing of SkewT diagrams... Unless they've gotten way better since the last time I called them.
Uh, yeah. Check again. They're blank there too.
Looks like a useful site, though, I'll have to check it out once the government is up and running again. Thanks.
They're very useful for winter flying. In fact, I would say that they're essential. Yes, I was flying before we all "discovered" such things, though I'm not sure exactly how long they've been out. We used to rely on AIRMETs, which tend to really suck when it comes to predicting icing.
I really like to use them to figure out icing potential and where the cloud layers are.