Slashdot Mirror
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.
Wouldn't a satellite named "QuickScat" be properly used for improvising jazz lyrics?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Like many important things, this has taken a back seat to the needs of the Military Machine to support Iraq and well as their own technology projects for spying on Americans and the rest of the world.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The current crowd in power really does seem to believe they can create their own reality. As Ron Suskind reported,
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'''
But, as Ronald Reagan said—quoting John Adams, consciously or unconsciously, without attribution—"facts are stubborn things."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This is all part of a ploy by the global warming alarmists to show how "crazy" hurricanes are behaving and how meteorologists can no longer predict their path with the accuracy they could in the past. To ensure another Katrina doesn't happy, the Imperial Federal Government will establish behavior guidelines to make sure the citizens are acting in a way that is friendly to our environment.
Shortly after that, Freedom and Liberty are brought out back and shot.
</tin foil hat off>
Boy it's a lovely day outside.
Can someone who knows about hurricane prediction please answer a quick question for me? I heard countless predictions on the media that global warming was going to cause the 2006 hurricane season to be catastrophically intense and large. Obviously it wasn't.
Where were the media's predictions coming from? Did the hurricane forcasters in the scientific community screw up (i.e. were the scientists really predicting a large hurricane season)? Or did the media just present a one-sided view when really many hurricane forcasters were not predicting anything unusual?
Because if the hurricane forcasting is so off as to generate such predictions as we were heard about 2006, then a decrease in accuracy of 16% probably isn't that serious, is it (they're so far off anyways)?
I'm writing as a layman here.
Cause really, what are the chances that a hurricane would destroy a major metropolitan area? Oh wait...
It's great to know that there's at least a few people with a sense of integrity and responsibility walking the halls of government agencies. People like Bill Proenza.
He'll be fired within a year.
The full John Adams quote (from "Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials"):
The Founding Fathers wisdom FTW!
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."
Sometimes you have to choose between being right and having a job.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
A few things here:
Firstly, I believe that when it is referring to hurricane forecasts, it is actually referring to hurricane tracking, not predicting the number of hurricanes in the upcoming season. A 16% decrease in the accuracy of hurricane forecasting therefore would result in meteorologists being less sure of the path that a hurricane would take. It's possible it's also referring to the prediction of a storm system being elevated to 'hurricane' status after forming a tropical storm/depression.
Even assuming I am completely wrong (that wouldn't be surprising) and the satellite will be use to help predict hurricane seasons, hopefully the replacement satellite will offer forecasters some new information to help in the future (Not every year's predictions are as off as the 2006 predictions, but if they were, I'd agree with you, a accurcy decreasing by 16% really won't make much of a difference.)
Secondly, while the 2006 hurricane season was grossly overstated and scientists really were predicting a record number of hurricanes, you can blame the media for creating a frenzy regarding the results. In any other year, the prediction might have gotten a mention on page 20 of a newspaper, or the science section of CNN.com, but after hurricane Katrina, media outlets jumped at the opportunity for more scaremongering. So I'd say, both are to blame.
One of the important things to realize is that he's not saying the acgency is necessarily underfunded, but that it has the money to easily replace the satellite but it is being used for PR instead.
It looks like they're predicting a record number of storms this year too..
The predictions were based on the computer models. In hindsight, they went back and analyzed the atmospheric data and found that there was a lot of dust in the atmosphere, being carried by the prevailing winds. The dust was coming from the sahara. It appears that the dust had the affect of reducing storm intensity. That's the kind of thing that's hard to account for in a model. Especially when it the variables can change significantly from year to year.
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.
There's no point in putting up a replacement for the failing satellite...after all, the Rapture will be here soon enough, and whoever's left deserves to be surprised by the weather.
</snark>
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
There must not have been a contractor willing to line pockets thick enough to get this job done.
Seriously, this administration is letting everything essential rot on the vine while they push war, war, war.
BushCo just does not understand that when the decision is made to "go", it will be years before another satellite can be put in place. They are compromising safety, lives, and disaster response.
It's sad. Very sad.
Now the real problem is ... you can't really address the problem by shooting at something. So that makes it a downright un-American issue.
Now here's what to do about it.
First of all the NOAA has to be brought under the Department of Home Security because that's where the money is nowadays. Secondly, submit a {sizeable} donation to to e.g. the Cato institute or an equivalent, and have them bring together a posse of "intelligence experts", who go on record as being "worried" that hurricanes may be caused by Al-Quaeda, or that Al-Quaeda is somehow taking advantage of them. PR campaigns in the media are optional, but be sure to work the lobby circuit.
Then introduce the number of tracked hurricanes as a DOH success metric. That's important because it's a measurable and *achievable* goal.
Now you've created a win-win situation! The DOH gets a clearly visible and achievable success metric [they haven't got all that many of those], and the NOAA gets the funding to track hurricanes in every part of the globe. Problem solved.
The problem with an observational science like geology, astronomy or meteorology is that you have to take what nature gives you. You can't set up a controlled experiment that (fully) tests the real world conditions. When an event occurs you have to take all the measurements you possibly can. Then you sit back go to your (super)computer and your models and try and figure out what happened. Two different groups can approach the same situation from different angles, and can both independently come to different, reasonable, conclusions. In an experimental science like chemistry or particle physics, you'd perform another experiment controlling something thats different in the two models, look at this one's results, and then see how the two hypotheses hold up. You can't do this in an observational science. If we ever get exactly the same situation again, excepting either the dust in the atmosphere or el nino then you could make possibly come to some more concrete conclusions.
In short: this is how science works. Multiple hypotheses for the same event simply mean that we don't have a full understanding of what happened. You need more data, which in an experimental science means more experiments. In an observational science that means sitting back and hoping that mother nature will give you something that will validate/invalidate your hypothesis.