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US Climate Satellite Capabilities In Jeopardy
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired:
"The United States is in danger of losing its ability to monitor key climate variables from satellites, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. The country's Earth-observing satellite program has been underfunded for a decade, and the impact of the lack of funds is finally hitting home. The GAO report found that capabilities originally slated for two new Earth-monitoring programs, NPOESS and GOES-R, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Defense, have been cut, and adequate plans to replace them do not exist. Meanwhile, up until six months ago, NASA had 15 functional Earth-sensing satellites. Two of them went down in the past year, and of the remaining 13, 12 are past their design lifetimes. Only seven may be functional by 2016, said Waleed Abdalati, a longtime NASA satellite scientist now teaching at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Taken together, American scientists will soon find themselves without the ability to monitor changes to key Earth systems at a time when such measurements could help determine the paths of the world's energy and transportation systems."
This will spark Congress to fund useful things like space exploration. Instead of stupid things. Like oh... pick something.
GOES-R?
Wasn't that the badguy in Ghostbusters?
The money has all been used up on the much more important (sarcasm) war on Iraq. While Obama has continued these wars when he should have killed them immediately, I doubt we would have gotten as much from McCain/Palin alternative and the Republicans, who ignore the data and as well believe in religious nonsense more than science.
Because of Republican ideologies, important environmental and human health needs are ignored while we spend billions on a war in Iraq. I call it the result of a mental disorder.
With the health care bill for instance, it is disgusting that we would have Republicans basically murder thousands of more people each year by blocking the health care reform, which will safe millions of lives, while their is always enough money for their stupid wars.
The US needs to be investing in renewable energy like wind and solar and nuclear fusion development, and on energy efficient improvements to cities to base them on public transit, bike and pedestrian use, and we need to put in tariffs to keep the jobs in the US to fix our economy which has been damaged by offshoring which Republicans love as it increases corporate profit at the expense of working americans.
This will probably wind up getting funding for one reason -- national security. It's vital to defense to be able to monitor (and to a large degree, predict) the weather. Think multi-billion dollar supercarrier fleet accidentally heading into a hurricane.
Or does the defense department have their own weather satellite network?
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Like that. Or any other corporate welfare
Does anyone know anything about how the US network integrates with it's foreign equivelants? Is there any integratation? The ESA and Japanese Agency both profess to have, albeit limited, capabilities in this area and I seem to remember a little collaboration between the various structures. Am I just imagining things?
Regardless, doesn't it make sense for this sort of mission to occur within an international framework. Metric jokes aside, wouldn't it be fairer for everyone to take on the cost of these satellite systems? Perhaps I'm confused as to what they're there for - are they an investement into modelling and technology so as to promote American scientific superiority, some kind of early warning and monitoring system, or an elaborate dick waiving contest?
Who needs climate satellites when all the facts are available for the taking from the White House press office?
Maybe it will be EASIER without these satellites to force massive regulation and taxes on the lowly serfs in this world if there is less information available, so we will all just have to take their word for it that their massive expansion of government control over commerce and people will 'fix the environment'.
After all, if these satellites are working, someone might actually look at the REAL data and discover the truth and expose the lies and deceptions that were in the 'filtered' data they are given by the priests of climate science.
Environmental monitoring seems like one area where the US does not need to be self-sufficient. I wonder if we could work more closely with Europe and Japan so together we'd get all the data we need without having to foot the whole bill.
Why launch your own satellites when you can just get the data from other nations - doubtless India and China will be launching plenty of satellites soon, Europe still puts up the odd bird, Japan, Korea etc etc.
Even if they dont sell you the data, all you need are some radios and the FBIs decryption machinery and the weather info will be on the torrent sites before it's out of date. Err maybe.
Enough people who couldn't care any less. And frankly I don't too.
The whole point about climate change isn't climate change.
There is only one question. Do you want to poison and pollute the world we're living in?
Privacy is terrorism.
...someone probably received an award and promotion for claming they saved the government money.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
tom skilling / the weather channel can't pitch in? and maybe even launch there own?
Quick someone call Al Gore, manbearpig has reached orbit
I am confused. What exactly is the sprawling, flexible, fully staffed, heavily equipped, mult-billion dollar scientific research platform for? Apparently it is NOT to be used for astronomy, Earth imaging, or climate data collection. That leaves .... ummm ... growing seeds and crystals in microgravity ... and .... ummm ... shrinking bones and muscles in microgravity. But she shore is purty when she passes overhead. Sheesh.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
Social spending was not decreased to fund the war in Iraq. Social spending ballooned during the Bush administration. Also? Democrats voted for the war in Iraq as well. The vast majority of them. And they keep voting to fund it. And they have continued to not vote to fund the satellites since taking control of Congress.
What part of the health care reform bill will save thousands of lives? Do you even know what the bill does? Have you read any of it? Even a summary? All the bill does is give more money to insurance corporations, force people to buy health insurance who didn't before, and tax the middle class. That's it. There's no magic spells in it to save lives. You've swallowed the partisan bullcrap hook, line, and sinker.
Wait, what do you want us to spend money on? Earlier you made it sound like you wanted the money spent on health care, now you want it on energy development? Wasn't this article about the lack of funding for earth sensing satellites? You're rambling just a bit...
You really are completely blinded by partisan rhetoric, aren't you? First off, Democrats are just as pro-corporate (if not even more pro-corporate) than Republicans. There's no difference in the parties there. Second off, how would tariffs help our economy? If we raise tariffs, then everyone we trade with raises tariffs, and then suddenly OUR products are too expensive to be sold in other countries. So you'd raise tariffs to save some worthless manufacturing jobs at the expense of our high-tech industries? That's a policy of insanity.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
facts.
politicians hate 'em.
One thing that is frequently overlooked is the importance of comparable satellites through time for long-term environmental monitoring. This makes collaboration with other countries /sensors challenging, as to say Landsat ETM data's ~30m (for example) is comparable to SPOT data's ~10m (again, for example) is quite a stretch. Common tools for taking care of these differences are fraught with problems, and worse still many people don't care about or just ignore these problems during analysis....
How about some other countries picking up the tab for a change? Why does the USA have to be the country responsible for everything? (yeah, I'd rather have the USA do it than anyone else, but just saying some other countries should chip in some bucks once in a while)
So at a time when scientist need them the most to make their case for global climate change,, Now who might want us to not be able to have more facts to prove that the climate is in fact changing and warming...
His 1st state of the union speech he identified a few billion of wasted farm money to cut from the budget. I thought it was naive move that only a city politician would make. It died so fast and so hard it never was mentioned ever again; either it was bargained or dropped. I've never heard it come up again so it didn't gain anything to bargain with the last time. You can forget about fixing this until Monsanto has a BP like disaster that destroys a huge amount of land or kills a few thousand people THEN obama can squeak bye some tiny fix-- just watch this Oil lobby keep most their welfare despite BP... now that Obama is after their welfare money with (more) public support.
Senators of worthless states have too much power since the filibuster became the most successful DoS attack on democracy a few generations ago. These punks blackmail the whole country all the time to get such pork and it costs far more than the few cases often cited as justification for the filibuster. (not saying it has to die, but it would be far better if it did die than if left around; we are currently on the worst side of two extremes.)
In my state, all we hear is cut spending etc; and its largely fueled by those who want it permanent; completely unaware that they want to be like Alabama or Mississippi and those states suck; you don't get to the top by being cheap (or wasting too much; although CA does pretty good so far considering their huge mess that continues to pile up... which comes full circle because CA's system is caused by a filibuster like situation!)
Furthermore, the biggest thing slowing the recovery during the great depression was lazy states cutting services and using the new deal to balance their budgets not put anybody to work; now we are repeating the mistakes again. FYI: look at the debt to GDP for WW2; also, government debt is good for buffering hard times but we've been exploiting it for far too long.... that doesn't mean it shouldn't be used for when its actually a good thing, like restoring the economy. Don't get into Fed arguments and currency with me, I'm aware of that mess - seriously do you people think if FDR couldn't touch the Fed who caused the great depression ANYBODY can touch them today??
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GWB believed in AGW and his personal residence is very energy efficient. Why would he bother to pay up for an efficient house if he didn't believe in AGW? He certainly didn't get any positive press for it and he could easily have paid the utilities either way. It's time to stop making up shit.
I sort of figure an honest awger and a honest denier would like to see lot of new data from a lot of different sources. But let speculate that awg is flakey. Then figure the reasons are at a geopolitical level. For instance, to eliminate sovereigny (spelling) or real tech progress, then new good data might well be inconvenient.
If you figure this is just a dem sort of behavior, looking at Cheney and at GW doing geopolitics would be instructive.
Well, between the 350 report and BP oil spill government planners realized there will be no environment to monitor pretty soon :) Why spend the money ;
I knew Waleed back when he was grunt researcher taking gps measurements on the Greenland icesheet and I was a grunt programmer. He has really done well on his own initiative, rising through many roles of importantance. Meanwhile nearly 20 years later, I'm still a grunt programmer. "No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun." Pink Floyd.
We don't need no stinking satellites. We make this climate stuff up now as we go along.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think it's pretty obvious. The oil plume as reached space.
Of course this will just make it easier for NASA to fake the temperature numbers.
It's sad to see that anti-intellectualism has taken such a foot hold on this website. So much for news for nerds. It's amazing seeing people here arguing in favor of cutting science research.
So, climate satts have been underfunded for ten years. Who took over the funding and policy apparatus in 2000 that might have led to this? Hmmm, could it be... SATAN?
Luke, help me take this mask off
There is an agreement between ESA/EUMETSAT on the European side and NASA/NOAA on the American side that the burden of Earth observation is shared.
For operational polar satellites, Europe takes care of the morning orbits and the US does the afternoon orbits. Both sides share (or intend to share) all data in Near Real Time (NRT).
Also sensors/instruments are exchanged and mounted on platforms (read: satellites) from the other partner in the agreement. This can mean that a sensor built in the US can be flown on a European satellite.
Nowadays the aim at space agencies/operators is to avoid duplication of sensors and share what there already is. In this way a reduction in funding for Earth observation can be achieved. However, it should not drop below the minimum required to keep your end of the agreement and also needs to be enough to keep the knowledge 'current'.
Onet
...when (no matter which party is in power) they'll just massage the data to say what they want anyway? Why not just skip a step and let them craft it from the beginning?
-Styopa
The accumulating space shrapnel will soon take care of the rest.
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
The big problem with earth-sensing satellites is that they are constructed in the most expensive way possible. NASA and other agencies pay companies like Lockheed to custom -build satellites out of antique discrete-component circuits. This drives the price of the sensor platform into the hundreds of millions, and even billions of dollars. If satellite components were built from commercial off-the-shelf logic chips, the price of remote sensing satellites could be brought down to the 10s of millions or cheaper. We could launch more satellites more often, and they would produce more consistent and reliable data. The problem is finding watchdogs with enough technical savvy to catch NASA in these boondoggle programs and hold them accountable.
This really *is* a big deal. I've been working in a related area since 2001, and every year it seems like the NASA budget is getting worse and worse. We are funded by NASA and collect environmental data (similar to one of the satellites that "just" failed, ICESat) and have often been working on a shoestring when it comes to R&D and hardware. These satellites take years to develop and finally get into orbit. Without funding *now*, we could possibly be years without proper monitoring of our Earth. It's not all about Global Warming, but there are tons of other things that NASA looks at for a better understanding of our earth. OTOH, if a new ICESat weren't being built, that would just be more work for me.
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Would any of these ESA programs provide the same data: Earth Explorers at a glance ?