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Say Nothing About the Failing Satellite
The QuikScat satellite used for predicting the intensity and path of hurricanes could fail at any time (it's already past its designed lifetime). Without this satellite, the accuracy of US forecasters' predictions could be degraded by up to 16% — and there are no plans for any replacement. Bill Proenza, director of the National Hurricane Center, has been outspokenly critical of his superiors on this situation, but he has been warned to stop commenting on it.
Scatterometer:
"A radar scatterometer is designed to determine the normalized radar cross section (sigma-0) of the surface. Scatterometers operate by transmitting a pulse of microwave energy towards the Earth's surface and measuring the reflected energy. A separate measurement of the noise-only power is made and subtracted from the signal+noise measurement to determine the backscatter signal power. Sigma-0 is computed from the signal power measurement using the distributed target radar equation.
"The primary application of spaceborne scatterometry has been measurements near-surface winds over the ocean. By combining sigma-0 measurements from different azimuth angles, the near-surface wind vector over the ocean's surface can be determined using a geophysical model function (GMF) which relates wind and backscatter. Scatterometer wind measurements are partiularly useful for monitoring hurricanes. Scatterometer data is being applied to the study of tropical vegetation, soil moisture, polar ice, and global change."
AFAICT, that this satellite helps to predict the behavior and path of an individual active hurricane, which would be useful for deciding where and when to post warnings and evacuation orders. That task would have almost nothing in common with forecasting the statistical nature of an overall hurricane season.
Lots more about QuickScat here:
http://manati.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/quikscat/
I would agree that the data from the satellite is used to predict the path of individual hurricanes. The season prediction probably wouldn't include real time wind speed data.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Miami Herald: "No replacement currently is in development and the loss of QuikScat could diminish the accuracy of some hurricane forecasts by up to 16 percent, Proenza and other experts have said."
AP: "An aging weather satellite crucial to accurate predictions on the intensity and path of hurricanes reportedly could fail at any moment, but plans to launch a replacement have been pushed back seven years to 2016. If the satellite faltered, experts estimate that the accuracy of two-day forecasts could suffer by 10 percent and three-day forecasts by 16 percent, which could translate into miles of coastline and the difference between a city being evacuated or not."
"Last year, forecasts were off an average of 111 miles two days in advance, a figure that has been cut in half over the past 15 years. But experts said that could grow 10 percent to 122 miles if the satellite is lost, causing the "cone of error" well known to coastal residents to expand."
i gather that if the satellite is lost the margin of error would expand 11 miles, which doesn't seem that drastic to me.
You are more right then you know. What usually is true is cases like this is that the people splitting the money are so far removed from the people who need it that they don't know what is going on. Yes, there's an ad-campaign going on, but that's a different budget, through a difference approval chain, etc etc.
I deal with finance people on a daily basis and it's a nightmare. The last things on their mind is allowing is allowing the money to be used for useful purposes. Indeed, the system is set up to prevent the money from being spent easily.
Also, money isn't just "money". It's either capitalized money or non-capitalized, which means that it has to be spent on items that can be depreciated (like a satellite) or items that can't (like advertising).
The best part is that if you don't spend all your "money" for that year - you get in trouble. They go back and decide that because you didn't spend it (regardless of why) you had to much to begin with and they reduce your funding for next year.
On top of THAT, you have to go through "Approved" suppliers that have agreements to provide certain commodities, and those suppliers are generally pricing things 20% above their price at a place like, say, Amazon.com.
I feel his pain - but as you said, he needs to stop pissing off people to keep his job. To top it off, he's likely pissing off people who don't control the purse strings.
In my going for sarcasm in the last sentence, I didn't mean to imply that ocean temperatures are only slightly correlated with hurricanes. They are: warmer water gives you stronger hurricanes, because that's how they build up their energy.
Now here's the interesting part: the warmer waters given to us by climate change so far haven't actually been also giving us stronger storms. Instead they've been giving us more frequent storms. And so hurricane season actually started several weeks early this year, whereas when I was a kid, I remember them announcing the start of hurricane season, but then you didn't actually have any storms out there until August. And now you get them in May!
What's embarrassing is that my damn governor refused Federal help and let people die in their homes. Which (combined with the hugely incompetent recovery effort) is why she isn't running for re-election.
That's not what Heckofajob Brownie says.
I work at NOAA, in the satellite group National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/
1 2105.html Why did NPOESS cost overruns happen? "Hey, lets do a contract on some incredibly experimental sensors involving high risk research and make sure they are on a fixed budget". Not smart.
. cfm I'm not clear whether it was initially launched as NASA only and handed off to us, or if they "owned" the satellite while we did the ground systems for it.
The US government regularly under-funds satellites & space systems. You can see this with the huge cost overruns on NPOESS http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive05/NPOESS_1
I am off on a tangent though - Quickscat is a different story. Quickscat was a NASA R&D bird . See http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/index
NASA does R&D type of satellites - proof of concepts, risk reduction, etc. We in NESDIS-NOAA often take over running them, or we run their sensors on our satellites. Well, these proof of concept satellites were never intended to be part of a series providing a continual new functionality.
NESDIS/NOAA has two major satellite series that will always (in the future) have spares for:
GOES series http://osd.goes.noaa.gov/
POES series http://www.oso.noaa.gov/poes/ (although the newest will be NPOESS via a joint program with DoD replacing our POES and DoD's DMSP)
There is another satellite that is likely to fall soon too - Windsat/Coriolis http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Projects/windsat.html While Windsat is technically a Navy satellite, we run that one too, and it has no replacement either. Fortunately, Windsat is more about Navy stuff than it is about Hurricane tracking...
Bill Proenza, as a consumer of NESDIS' satellite data, sees NOAA efforts on the publicity side as being detrimental to the funding of the NOAA-NWS-National Hurricane center funding. Well, for the sake of accuracy, a few million dollars isn't going to fix our funding shortfalls...
Until Congress starts funding new satellite development properly (not like NPOESS) this problem won't go away.
QuikSCAT is for profiling a storm, which does improve the forecast. Every mile of coastline that has to be evacuated costs us around $1,000,000 (maybe more these days), and a 16% decrease in track forecast accuracy has a real monetary impact.
Predicting the number of storms in a season is tricky business. Last year El Nino fired up, which created a situation that suppressed hurricanes. Otherwise the conditions were very good for hurricane development. That hasn't really changed, so this year could see many storms since the El Nino has weakened. But it is possible it will just be an average year.
NOAA's and NASA's earth observing satellite fleets are aging, and replacements are either not in the queue or 8+ years away. Our radar satellites like QuikSCAT and microwave-sensing satellites, both of which are critical for tropical weather monitoring, are past their useful lifetimes with no replacements on deck. This is a problem. One could argue that the problem is funding, and to some degree it is, but another part of the problem is management and a lack of useful oversight by Congress. We are going to lose some of our weather and climate monitoring abilities because we launched a number of research satellites that we came to rely on and then did not make any plans to replace them.
The issue has been widely debated -- she issued the necessary declaration. Nagin was at best wrong, and, at worst, lying.
Sorry -- Blanco was right, and the Feds were wrong here.
Yeah, I figured this guy was going to force me to pull up cites, so here we go:
http://www.gfdl.gov/~tk/glob_warm_hurr.html
A quick first search turned this one up, and it seems to list all the papers along with dissents.
If you look at section #4, those are the papers I'm thinking of. Dissenters seem to say that our instrumentation isn't accurate(*) and that the data set isn't long enough. Too bad we won't actually put up more and better instrumentation.
(*) There's six hurricane basins to look at. Some satelites only cover a small area, some may be old and not very sensitive. Etc.
Correct; to see this, take a look at the current sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly map, which shows the departure from normal temperatures (I think it's the average of 10 or so years from satellite data):g ht.6.14.2007.gif
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomni
Notice the cool (blue anomaly) waters off of the coast of Peru. The water was warmer than normal last year (El Nino) and has now switched to a weak La Nina, which is supposedly favorable for Atlantic hurricane formation. However, currently there is a lot of shear in the Atlantic so not much has developed thus far.
Source/more information (and to see older maps from late last season) is available here:
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/climo.html
Obviously you used your karma bonus to even get to 2 on /. But - very well written post. The guy who responded to you is under the delusion that it was the federal government's job to shore up the levies [rather than the LA Corps of Engineers - who squandered enormous amounts of money on everything except improving the levies]. It's been "common knowledge" amongst people in NO for decades that the levies wouldn't withstand a Cat 3. But it apparently wasn't a problem right up until the 2000 election. The responder also thinks that Nagin and Blanco are completely blameless too. Even though Mayor Nagin called for the mandatory evacuation on Sunday morning under pressure from President Bush [my wife wisely left on Saturday during the suggested evacuation]. And even though President Bush was requesting that Governor Blanco ask for Federal Disaster relief well before the levies broke - a request that she denied.
/. can't seem to manage to add a deleted column to their user database]. I just do AC anymore. Not like it has any impact on my modding. Unless I follow the lock step party line here, I'm destined to get modded down anyway.
Now - should the Feds have had everything lined up and ready to go once Blanco had finally given up on her stubborn stance? Most definitely. Obviously Bush's advisors had been briefing him on the seriousness of the situation or he wouldn't have pressured Nagin into the mandatory evacuation nor been pressuring Blanco into requesting FEMA support before the levies broke. So he should have known that it wasn't a matter of "if" they were going to be needed but rather a matter of "when". And FEMA didn't even remotely have their shit together once they did finally get the request for aid. In large part due to what I see as cronyism in Bush's appointment of Michael Brown. But to make Nagin, Blanco, and company into a bunch of helpless victims at the mercy of the evil Bush empire is not only disingenuous, it's downright ignorant.
Anyway. It's that whole attitude that seems to be prevalent here that's made me abandon my account [I'd prefer to delete it, but