Sailors and airplane pilots must know about possible storms. Emergency officials must track the progress of hurricanes or prepare for blizzards. Farmers must know if their crops might freeze, and dam managers must know how much snowmelt they may expect to flow into reservoirs. That's because weather data is usually timed by the day of the month and the time of day, he said. The Y2K problem is created by the year.
Some computers measure the year using only the last two digits.
Another weather computer, the primary system used to gather bits of information into a coherent picture and create forecasts, is new enough that it was installed after users were alerted to the Y2K bug, Hill said. Some instruments, such as the ocean buoys that measure water temperature and wave height, do use year data. Those systems have been put through tests to ensure they won't fail, Hill said. Ore. The service maintains more than 600 of the instruments, mostly in mountains in the western United States. They transmit the raw data for forecasting the year's water supply stored in the snows.