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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."
GOES-R?
Wasn't that the badguy in Ghostbusters?
What is the cause of U.S. agricultural inefficiencies?
Do I win a prize? This is about Climate Satellites in Jeopardy, right?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ahh of course. "Save Wall Street from flooding due to the Polar Ice Caps melting!" or some such.
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need are some radios and the FBIs decryption machinery and the weather info will be on the torrent sites before it's out of date.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.
Unfortunately you are not a climate satellite, so you don't win anything.
I thought that's what this article is all about. The climate satellites haven't won anything for years.
So, what do I win?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!