The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) could lose access to its network due to a lapsing contract.

As reported by Bloomberg, and citing an internal document viewed by the publication, a short-term work order underpinning the N-Wave network is set to end this week, and could bring down data transfer services for NOAA.

NOAA operates the US' National Weather Service, and also supports branches of the armed forces, including the US Navy and Air Force.

The N-Wave system provides Internet connectivity for NOAA, enabling the department to transmit weather and environmental data nationwide. It also supports the transmission of data between NOAA's data centers and supercomputing facilities.

Along with other national meteorological services, NOAA continually monitors the atmosphere with globally distributed sensors. That data is then processed on NOAA's supercomputers to generate forecast models.

The department upgraded its Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System (WCOSS) in the summer of 2023, giving it twin supercomputers, each with 14.5 petaflops of computing capacity. This, an increase of 20 percent compared to the previous solution, improves the detail and accuracy of its forecasts.

Those forecasts have a huge global impact - for example, hitting the stock market, should agricultural stocks be affected by a change in weather, or even saving lives in the context of hurricanes or wildfires.

With the N-Wave work order set to expire on Thursday (May 1) morning, NOAA has warned of the potential for "severe disruptions" to its ability to transfer data. If the contract lapses, users will not be able to connect to the Internet or access cloud resources hosted by N-Wave, the document said.

The government department did not respond immediately to Bloomberg's request for comment.

N-Wave has been providing NOAA with network services since 2009. According to the NOAA website, N-Wave's "foundation" relies on partnerships and relationships between NOAA, the Department of Commerce, other federal agencies, and the academic and state research network communities.

The N-Wave network extends across the US, including Alaska and Hawaii, reaching remote field sites, major campuses, and data centers. The network is combined with "scalable cloud solutions."

N-Wave is currently developing a connection between the Air Force and AWS' secure gov cloud.

Read more about how supercomputers and data centers are used by National Weather Services here