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Weather Satellites Lose Funding
ianare writes "Federal budget cuts are threatening to leave the US without some critical satellites, and that could mean less accurate warnings about events like tornadoes and blizzards. In particular, officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are concerned about satellites that orbit over the earth's poles rather than remaining over a fixed spot along the equator. These satellites are 'the backbone' of any forecast beyond a couple of days, says Kathryn Sullivan, assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction, and NOAA's deputy administrator. It was data from polar satellites that alerted forecasters to the risk of tornadoes in Alabama and Mississippi back in April, Sullivan says. 'With the polar satellites currently in place we were able to give those communities five days' heads up,' she says."
If these are the satellites that I'm thinking of, this would be very bad indeed. There isn't any inherent reason why the US needs to be the only ones with satellites doing this work, but the reason it's being cut is to appease climate change skeptics. And unless the ESA or somebody else gets satellites up there to prevent a potential gap in recordings we'll largely have to start over.
From the article, we're not the only ones with those sorts of satellites, there apparently aren't enough of them to fill the gap that we'd be leaving.
As a ham I and a meteorologist. MacTO and DarthBart have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. DarthBart is able to use $200 worth of equipment because NOAA/NASA spent a few million dollars extra in terms of on-board equipment and satellite weight to maintain a signal they should dropped in 1975. No it isn't as easy as buying a cheap receiver and loading some software. The reason his images are poor is because it takes a lot of tuning and just the right timing to get a decent image. Having used APT imagery in the south Atlantic and in the North Pacific on field campaigns it takes a lot of effort and expensive hardware to get a clean image. An APT image once an hour is of little use when you are trying to tell which storm is moving where to give people more than a 30 second warning. MacTO: So I guess one of the AMSAT's has both 1km visible and 4km IR imagers? I guess one of the AMSAT's is in a Geostationary orbit so I can get imagery every 3 minutes? I guess one of the AMSET's has a profiler so I can receive vertical temperature, humidity and wind profiles every 30km every 3 minutes. Guess what AMSAT's are little more than a glorified repeater Since my students have built a cube sat I know that the bulk of the work has been done by NASA not hams. Hams serve an important role in society, to open them up to ridicule with foolish garbage does more harm than good