Add an Observation to our Recon Archive (in Beta Testing) < Return to the main recon page   Sometimes our site misses an observation and it may take some time for us to notice it or we may never notice it. You can help add an observation into our recon system by using this secure utility. This helps us to make sure that our recon data is as complete as possible in a more timely manner. To add an observation, simply insert a link to the actual observation in the National Hurricane Center's web based Reconnaissance Data Archive located at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/recon/. Our site will retrieve the observation(s) from the link you provide, process the data, and add it into our recon archive if it can be properly decoded. Please be patient when you use this utility as it can take some time to complete the task. It is okay if there is more than one observation in the file. Our site will process all of the observations, in order, so hopefully any corrected observations will be at the end of the file. In order to make this utility secure, we only allow observations to be retrieved from the folder above at the National Hurricane Center. You can add most observations posted within the past 24 hours as long as the storm folder has not been moved on our site and the observation you are adding has not already been added. For those two cases you can only add observations from the past 2 hours. This is because we sometimes organize observations after a few hours and if an observation is added after that the system will add the observation to the wrong location. This utility is built to add observations from the Atlantic basin into our archive. While our manual decoder can process data from other basins, our archive is only for the Atlantic. Additionally, non-tropical reconnaissance code observations (RECCO) cannot be added into our live recon system. Sometimes observations are partially corrupt and our system will reject them. Additionally, sometimes an observation will come across that our system has not been properly coded to handle and may need an adjustment in order to process the observation. In these cases you will be unable to add an observation using this utility. We will need to add the observation ourselves, if possible, using our manual utility to see what went wrong and make corrections if needed.