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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.
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.
...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)
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
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....
Because where the satellite is has a large impact on the data.
There are really only two classes of orbit for Earth-observation satellite platforms: geostationary and low-earth polar. In the summary, GOES-R is the US follow-on geostationary, and NPOESS is the US follow-on polar orbiter.
Geostationary satellites provide continuous coverage but somewhat low resolution, and coverage of the same hemisphere of the Earth at all times. Because satellite observations at the limb of the visible hemisphere is low-quality (low incident angle with the Earth's surface, long slant path through the atmosphere, etc.), you really can't just have two geos for the entire world. You need at least four, at 90 degree offsets, and more if you can afford it. The US operates two: GOES-11 and GOES-12, out over the eastern Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean respectively. There are more, operated by other nations, and we do share data with them. We even coordinate operations: When the Japanese Meteorological Agency had its on-station geosat (GMS-5) fail and its replacement failed to reach orbit after launch, the US reactivated the retired Pacific geo GOES-9, shifted its orbit to cover GMS-5's slot, and leased it to the Japanese. (Leased, of course, because (A) you need to cover the additional costs of operating another satellite, and (B) why walk away from profit?)
So, what's the point of that little discussion? If the US loses both of current active geostationaries, someone else (another nation) would have to shift an existing spacecraft over to cover it and lease it to us. That's a bit bigger than "sharing the data", which, as I point out, we already do. And that's also only a temporary state of affairs, since no one will ever shift over their primary on-station geostationary. It'd have to be a spare, and probably not a future spare, but a deactivated retired spacecraft, and therefore very very temporary.
That's geostationary spacecraft. In summary, the US needs to have 2 spacecraft stationed at 135 degrees West and 104 degrees West, and no one else will be providing them on any terms and with any permanence we'd need in order to rely on them.
Polar-orbiters? Kind of a similar situation. A polar-orbiting earth-observing spacecraft orbits at about 100 miles up and an orbital inclination of about 80 degrees. (A 90 degree orbital inclination passes over both poles; a 0 degree inclination parallels the equator.) That orbital path allows the spacecraft to look down at Earth in a track that eventually (approximately every 30 hours) covers the entire surface of the Earth. But that's a long time between looks at a particular spot on Earth. The low orbit provides wonderful resolution: each pixel in the imagery of one of the next-generation polar orbiters can be as small as 400 meters. For meteorology and climate observation, that's fantastic. But very low frequency. So you need multiple spacecraft to provide adequate temporal resolution (each pixel is newer than 24 hours). Also, different spacecraft can look at any given point on Earth at different local times (i.e., one spacecraft sees Albuquerque at about 6 AM local time, the next sees it at around 2:30 PM.) This matters because time-of-day variation and sun zenith angle matter at the resolutions and sensitivities of the instruments in question.
No one but the US operates polar orbiters in the polar slots that the US currently occupies, so no one can provide the data for us to use.
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Or does the defense department have their own weather satellite network?
That's a good question. It's wrapped up in this story.
The short answer is that yes, DoD has its own weather satellite network for the polar orbiting capability. It's called DMSP, and it's the granddaddy of polar orbiter weather satellites. Spacecraft from that program are still flying, but no new ones are being acquired. After the current and on-orbit spares are gone, that's probably it.
Why?
As part of a Clinton-administration order, all US weather satellite operations and acquisition activities were "converged" into a single agency. DoD lost its ability to independently acquire military weather sats, or begin development of new ones. The joint Earth observation satellite program now includes NOAA, NASA, and the DoD, and they have a limited budget and somewhat conflicting goals. But the practical effect is that everyone has to contribute to, and use when they become available, the next-generation EO satellites the article was talking about. To replace DMSP birds, the DoD is depending on NPOESS, since that's the next-gen polar orbiter.
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I think the climate angle of this story is being overplayed. Makes sense, really; that's the sexy hot topic in the big-brain set, and a great way to sell if you're selling satellites.
But these aren't just climate change "OMG Evil CO2" satellites. These are operational meteorological satellites. If you like decent weather forecasts and value the ability to track hurricanes and typhoons (and other assorted tropical storm phenomena), you care about these spacecraft. Satellite meteorology has revolutionized severe weather handling and medium-range weather forecasting for the last 40 years. Let's not quit now because Al Gore has painted the cross of Climate Change on the sides of these spacecraft.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Secondly, another reason is the number of people who live and work on farms. If you didn't subsidise, all of those people would be out of work.
I think you're missing the distinction. A lot of us are in favor of subsidizing small farmers in order to have a secure supply of food grown in our nation. The thing is, it used to be primarily small farms and a small portion of large agricultural operations. But large farming operations have driven the population you mention out of business and mostly out of work. 25% of the US lived and worked on farms in the 30's when the subsidies were first implemented. Now it's less than 2% of our population, with the majority of those subsidies going to huge corporate farms. In fact, a study a few years ago showed 73% of the subsidies are disproportionately paid to the 10% of farming production that makes up the largest, corporate farms. We not only subsidize larger farms more, but vastly more in proportion to what they make, underwriting their ability to drive out small farms and lower overall rates of employment.
But simply saying "corporate welfare" is a bit too general and doesn't help understand the underlying issues.
"Corporate Welfare" is a term used to describe bills and funding that move cash from tax dollars into the pockets of large corporations. It primarily happens because those corporations use their money to buy influence over the political system to create or modify laws in their favor. This is a pretty clear cut case of corporate welfare.
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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Yeah. It's more like "news for paranoid techno-libertarians" nowdays.
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