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WIMS removed from dashboard as FEMs team outlines mid‑December feature rollout and mesonet plans
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Summary
Participants on the FEMs/WIMS user call were told the legacy WIMS access was removed from the Grama dashboard and will be decommissioned at month’s end; the FEMs team apologized for interruptions in the recent 3.4 release, confirmed a mid‑December 3.5 release with catalog-editing and mesonet ingestion, and explained data, API and QA/QC limits users should expect.
Scott, a staff member leading the FEMs rollout, told users on the call that the legacy WIMS interface had been removed from the Grama dashboard and "will be fully decommissioned" at the end of the month, though some feeds (WXML) remain available to customers who maintain direct connections.
Scott said FEMs 3.4 was released the previous day and acknowledged "there were some interruptions in the service," apologizing for the disruption and saying the release added a banner capability to post short notices during future maintenance or incidents.
Why it matters: the transition changes how users access fire-weather and NFDRS-related products. Scott emphasized that FEMs did not import user adjustments or historical manipulations from WIMS; historical station records remain in the data warehouse but new calculations begin from the dates and stations brought into FEMs.
On schedule and features: the team is targeting a mid-to-early December release (3.5) that will let a limited set of administrators edit station catalog settings and is expected to include mesonet ingestion. "We are also hoping to have the mesonets available, ingested and available, by that time," Scott said. He explained mesonet ingestion is complex because mesonet stations report at different intervals (five, 10 or 20 minutes) and FEMs needs hourly summaries to compute NFDR outputs.
Historical mesonet data: Scott said FEMs will not provide historical mesonet-derived NFDR calculations prior to January 1 of the current year. "We will only be calculating from January 1 until current dates," he said, and recommended users who need older mesonet archives obtain those records from other sources.
Data access and exports: Scott reviewed API and export constraints. He said CSV downloads are limited by file-type conversion and currently restrict pulling large station sets for full periods of record; JSON/API pulls are less constrained. The team plans to relax CSV limitations in the 3.5 release, aiming to allow multi‑station exports (target: 5–7 stations for full period of record) rather than the current single‑station POR cap.
Power BI and SIG‑selector functionality: Scott and others demonstrated early Power BI reports and mapping features and said the team intends to provide SIG-like selection tools (lasso/mapping) and dispatch-friendly reports in Power BI rather than re-creating the old WIMS drawing tools immediately. "This is something where our data... will be directly hooked into our datasets," Scott said, describing Power BI as the path for advanced analytics and visualization.
QA/QC and flagged data: users asked about cleaned QA/QC datasets. Scott said the team is working with DRI and that Tim and Tom have been addressing algorithmic weaknesses (preset, wind and RH anomalies). A cleaned/gap‑filled QA/QC dataset is a target for the coming year but not guaranteed due to budget and development priorities. He also said an automated visual "fire danger flag" was removed because it was triggering too often; the team plans to reintroduce better automation later but, for now, users must monitor station data for missing observations.
Operational notes for users: Scott outlined observation cadence (ingests every 15–20 minutes, hourly outputs), the meaning of forecast markers (diamonds = forecast; circles = observed), and that daily summary views for the current day show forecasted totals until the overnight summary runs at station‑local midnight. He also confirmed station IDs were deliberately withheld from immediate downloads to avoid breaking user spreadsheets and will be reinserted in the December release.
What’s next: the FEMs team will continue to publish portal documentation and API examples, field training requests for January classes, and finalize the Synoptic contract to provide summarized mesonet data. The next formal delivery milestone remains the mid‑December 3.5 release. The call ended with Scott noting follow-up actions and stopping the recording.
