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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."
Ham radio enthusiasts have been doing this forever. Point your favorite directional antenna at a weather satellite and download today's weather fax. Not that difficult.
it's supposed to be cheaper.
[Just watch out for Amazon cloud crashes... ;-) ]
sigo ergo sum
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.
Nonsense. The reason it's being cut is there's less money around to pay for stuff and it's easier to cut spending on satellites than over-funded "think of the children" schools and other stuff that money is wasted on but is considered untouchable.
Ham radio enthusiasts have been doing this forever.
This may be so. But...
There are a *LOT* of big-time commercial orgs that make use of government funded weather sats. Maybe it's time that some of the Big Money Bags that make bank off of publicly funded things like the National Weather Service started ponying up a little cash-ola?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
So let me get this straight. We're paying billions upon billions and sacrificing our constitutional rights to guard our airports from purely theoretical terrorist threats. Meanwhile, we're cutting funding for satellites that warn us about very real weather threats. Glad to see we've got our priorities straight.
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016
This article is nothing more than a troll from NASA to scare people into thinking that if they don't get ALL their funding, people will die in blizzards and tornadoes.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
How many fighter bombers would have to be decommissioned to pay for them?
Defence is one thing, being the number one spender, by far, on the military on earth is something else entirely.
I'm guessing one*. F-18 Hornets cost $80 million per plane. The proposed NOAA budget cut is $57 million. There are 128 of these craft on order. So just buy 127 and NOAA can keep its budget levels intact.
*You're not actually going to save much decommissioning them. But you can cut back on how many you buy year to year.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Radio amateurs have been designing, building, and launching satellites for years. (Well, they contract out the launching.) It is called AMSAT.
There are plenty of joint ventures for weather satellite projects (JASON 3 being the current most visible project underway) as well as data sharing from foreign satellite programs to the US (MetOp for example), but basically it all comes down to money. We can afford to build them. NOAA has a long history of operating these polar orbiting satellites. The program under discussion here was called NPOESS. It was a joint project with DoD and it was more or less a complete disaster - after a decade and $11B spent, no satellite was ever launched, and the ground systems have been sitting idle for so long they're due for a technology refresh. So the White House blew up the program and NOAA took the valuable pieces and it became JPSS. So the budget cuts are a sort of "punishment" for mismanagement - basically Congress wants them to get the damn birds up already.
And lots and LOTS of small-time commercial orgs, non-commercial orgs, and individuals who make use of government-funded weather satellites.
Which is why it should be supported by taxpayer money.
Here in the US we're paying less taxes than we have in the past 60 years. During the "Reagan Recovery" (sic) we were paying about 15 percent more across the board and the top tiers were paying more than that. Corporations were paying almost twice as much forty years ago than they do today.
I would say that the National Weather Service is exactly the kind of thing that a 21st century government should be doing.
And I'm a bit offended by the verbiage in the title of this story. The Weather Service did not "lose" funding as if they had it in their pants pocket and misplaced it, their funding was systematically and purposely cut by the members of a particular political party in power because the National Weather Service is a successful government agency and "successful" and "government" in the same sentence goes against that party's core ideology. They hate government, possibly because they are so bad at it.
Now watch for Congress to try to privatize the Weather Service by selling off the polar satellites to big corporations who will then offer weather forecasting and data in four tiers: 1 timely information for themselves. 2 delayed accurate information for those that pay for it. 3 accurate information for the military, but only if the military pay about 200% more than the US government currently would pay to fully fund the whole program itself, and 4 delayed information for the rest of us, and only as accurate as they want it to be to best suit their agenda. (for example, if there were a heavily Democrat-leaning city on a gulf coast protected only by an out-of-date levee, they might want to wait a while before sending out the alert. After all, if there was a major flood and subsequent demographic upheaval in that place, scattering the concentration of Democratic voters as far as Idaho and Montana, it can only help the country, right?)
Not many people are aware of just how far certain politicians currently in office and the people they work for are willing to go to push their ideology, and practically none of us overestimate their capacity for inflicting pain on the population.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This article is nothing more than a troll from NASA to scare people into thinking that if they don't get ALL their funding, people will die in blizzards and tornadoes.
Or perhaps NASA is right to complain: people WILL die if they have to stop running those satellites?
comcast / weather channel has the funds to have there own weather satellites.
False.
Pentagon Pegs New Cost Estimate For NPOESS At $11.5 Billion
"The Pentagon's latest cost estimate for the scaled-back National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) program is $11.5 billion through 2020"
Lockheed Martin Lands $1 Billion Weather Satellite Contract
"The GOES-R system — whose total estimate life-cycle cost is $7.7 billion — will replace the GOES-N satellite series"
These are the two major NOAA weather satellite programs under current development. For comparison, check out Comcast's current market cap: $65B. No way in hell they'd undertake a risky $7-10B investment for a single cable channel requiring expertise in satellite design, construction, launch & operations that they don't have.
Don't forget that taxes are lower than they were during the Reagan Era. About 15% less for most, and an even more generous cut for the rich.
I live in Kansas. I noticed that all of the subtly racist vitriol against "those people" stupid enough to live in a hurricane zone has been remarkably silent as tornadoes ravage the Midwest and the victims beg the rest of the country for assistance.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
You do realize defunding the National Weather Service and turning to ostensibly private organizations such as AccuWeather (which unsurprisingly gets 90% of its data from the NWS, and thus essentially serves as nothing but a middle man) has been a long time goal of the Republican party.
And heaven forbid someone actually examine the cost-benefit ratio of a government program to determine whether or not that it is actually effective.
No. Of course not. Facts have no place in your worldview. It's just cheerleading.
People are not paying taxes, that's actually the problem. The middle class is being eliminated, poor people have no money to pay tax with and the rich get tax exemption.
Where do you think the money should come from?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, a couple of hundred bucks plus a fairly lo-noise receiving location with space for a small turnstile or crossed dipole antenna will do it.
But regardless, what your $200 (or $5000) gets you is the APT transmissions - a low-res 1 or 2 channel image which bears about as much relationship to the images the weather bureau uses for forecasting as YouTube does to Bluray...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
"has been a long time goal of the Republican party" Do you have a reference for this?
Look a little bit closer at that graph that you have linked. Notice the data nodes at the year "2011"?
We are paying the lowest amount of taxes as a percentage of GDP than we have since 1951, which according to my calculations is sixty years ago.
Now if you want to say that in four years we're going to be paying about the average percentage of GDP in taxes that we have in the past sixty years, I'll accept that. But right now, this year, 2011, we are paying the lowest actual amount of taxes paid per dollar of GDP that we have since 1951.
And by the way, if you could drill down a little closer to that graph, you'd find that the years we paid the highest amount of taxes as a percentage of GDP were years of solid economic growth and no economic bubbles. If you go back to WWII, you'll find that whenever the tax rate on the top income groups goes above 50%, we have dropping unemployment, greater growth of GDP and no economic bubbles. But whenever the top rate dips below 50% on top earners, we have rising unemployment, lower GDP and economic bubbles.
The chart that you have provided us shows that the federal government is NOT taking in enough money. Again, we're taking in less than we have in 60 years. Corporations used to pay about 15 percent of the total government revenue. Today, it's only about 6 percent, despite record corporate profits (even the average corporate profit is way up).
I think given that information it's clear to see what's happening.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Bullshit. You can receive APT images from the NOAA-N series of using a $20 homebrew turnstile antenna, a radio scanner, and a Windows/Linux box with a soundcard.
I think I have $125 invested in my system here.
If Big Weather (The Weather Channel, Intellicast, Accuweather, and a few others) start putting money into the system you know damn well that their first requirement will be to lockout anyone else.
Accuweather tried that one a few years back by buying Rick Santorum and getting him to start legislation (see S. 786) that prohibited the NWS from providing forecasts/data/whatnot to the public if a private corporation (*cough*Accuweather*cough*) could do it instead.
"The federal government takes in plenty of money from taxes. The problem is that they spend too much. I suggest even, across the board, cuts to balance the budget."
Amazing how two people can look at the same data and come to radically different views. Yes, the federal government has typically taken in around 18% of GDP in taxes (of one form or another). However the federal government has taken in only 14.9% of GDP in 2009 and 2010 (lowest since 1950) according to your chart; here's the actual numbers. So no, the government is not taking in plenty of money from taxes. I don't know about you but I really notice a ~20% drop in income and that's a major reason behind the current and projected budget deficits. So if we want to get serious about the budget we must start by repealing the disastrous Bush tax cuts, not by enacting recession-prolonging austerity measures borne entirely by the lower and middle classes.
tax revenues pretty much always increase. there's are these thing, called inflation, population growth, productivity increases.. thing is, after tax cuts, you are increasing FROM A LOWER POINT. in other words, you're collecting less than you would have otherwise.
sound economic policy is very simple. rack up huge deficits in down times to keep the economy going. pay them down when things are going well. problem is, every republican administration since reagan has set massive record after massive record for deficit spending EVEN DURING BOOM TIMES. now when we NEED that spending, they cry about the deficit. it would be laughable if it weren't so tragic.
the stimulus spending has saved our auto industry (and in the end cost very little) though that was a republican, of course, that started it... Kudos to him. and the stimulus very certainly helped blunt the full force of this recession. Biggest boom ever to biggest bust ever, this very easily could have been the great depression, and I can say that stimulus projects were the ONLY thing keeping many engineering and construction firms afloat for the last couple of years. And those people are the people who drive the economy. They have mortgages and car payments and kids, suppliers and workers, and the cash they get flows through the economy very rapidly. Unlike tax giveaways to people who already have enough money.
The tax rates did not, but the tax laws have, in favor of the biggest earners.
Your "liberal source" graph is not nearly fine enough to prove or disprove my assertion. The data points are decades, for god's sake. Go look at one that shows the numbers by year and you'll see what I mean.
And Slate is every bit as corporate as CNN. They are not a "liberal source" unless you're from the Far Right. Here's an authentic liberal source that shows what I'm talking about. Drill down into the charts themselves.
By the way, you'll notice that even the source you cited doesn't claim that high taxes hurts GDP or that lowering taxes helps the economy. In fact, it shows the opposite, demolishing the most important "conservative" talking point of all: that we are "over-taxed" and that such "over-taxing" hurts the economy or stifles growth.
(note: I know the poster, so if you want to see the spreadsheet that created those graphs, along with the exact IRS, Census and Bureau of Economic Analysis sources that were used, I'd be willing to send them to you, as long as you're willing to admit you are wrong in a Slashdot Journal associated with your user ID.)
You are welcome on my lawn.
You missed what I said. It was the highest tax rates on the top income brackets that brought the years of economic growth, lowest unemployment and fewest bubbles, not total tax revenue over GDP.
During the dot bomb days, the top earners were paying 38% (if I remember correctly). The reason we had such high revenues is that we were well into the "Reagan Revolution" when the middle class was getting hit the hardest while the rich were skating.
If you really want to see economic growth and strong, stable economies, you have to look for the years where the top brackets paid over 50% in federal income tax. Strangely, those were also the years when the rich did the best, too - even after taxes. Overall, if you carefully analyze the data, you'll find that the nation's economy does best when the top brackets pay well over 50%, because they are more inclined to invest in their companies, add workers, and thus end up making more money in the long run. Unfortunately, it seems like the economic elite have lost all taste for the "long run" and are looking to bust out the country for everything they can and then hope there are enough police still around to protect them. They'll have to be private police, of course.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Let me help you with this. I don't think its the "ideology" that drives them, though this "ideology" certainly is trumpeted. You have to look at motivation and the key term that you used is privatization. Privatization equates to corporate take over. The "ideology" is a smoke screen, its a well crafted piece of propaganda. It plays to sense of greed, hidden in all of us. Its mostly fantasy, much like buying a lottery ticket is.
What one has to do is see through the obfuscation, the red herrings and the propaganda. Easier said than done, but look at the end game. De-fund something, then it becomes up for grabs. This is a great trick if you can find politicians crooked enough and people dumb enough to fall for it. Sadly we have acres of both. And it isn't getting any better.
Take the Red Pill.
I can't find the plans directly online for the turnstile antenna I have, but here's an antenna that actually works a bit better, and probably costs about the same to build:
http://www.g4ilo.com/qfh.html
For the radio, I use a Radio Shack PRO-433 scanner I picked up a pawn shop for $50. It doesn't have the IF bandwidth to create perfect images, so I'll eventually upgrade that to an ICOM IC-100.
For the software, I use a package a friend of mine and I wrote running on a NetBSD server, but there are other packages for Linux and Windows:
http://www.wxtoimg.com/ is the first that springs to Google.
You can also pick up a copy of the Weather Satellite Handbook from ARRL for some other goodies.
Yeah, as an american it pisses me off that we fund so much, essentially subsidizing european socialism.
We need to cut back way big on the military, and let countries like germany have one.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
"Here in the US we're paying less taxes than we have in the past 60 years. During the "Reagan Recovery" (sic) we were paying about 15 percent more across the board and the top tiers were paying more than that. Corporations were paying almost twice as much forty years ago than they do today."
You mean we're paying less per person. While our economy doubled in the same time frame, actual US tax income has actually quadrupled $500Mil -> $2.5 Trillion from 1980 - 2007 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/U.S.-income-taxes-out-of-total-taxes.JPG
FYI that's well past inflation.
It's a tired and out of context argument that somehow we needed to keep these top tax rates (as much as 70%!) and that we've shortchanged ourselves, corporations are not paying enough, etc. Instead the truth is we've got about 100 million more people (and many more businesses) in the US than we did in 1980, and with more people you can lower the burden on all. In fact, if we had maintained government spending at 1980's levels (>$1 Trillion) and tracked to inflation we'd be just fine today - in fact we'd have a slight surplus. Instead, despite a doubling of the economy and the quadrupling of tax income, the government sextupled spending (>$1 Tril/year -> $6Tril/year)
The problem has not been taxes, instead it has been both parties spending far beyond revenues, and taking loans out to pay for it (or just pushing the bills into the future, which is why some reports have us at 70 Trillion in unfunded mandates)
Should these satellites go away? Probably not. But I'd like to see something else (or everything) cut first rather than to just add more tax burden.
Did anyone actually read the article? It was full of "what if" scenarios: If we don't get the funding... this COULD be an incredible loss. No one at NOAA would ever find a worthless waste of money like WEFAX over short wave that could be eliminated and no one would miss it, instead they go for the most popular, useful tool they have and threaten to kill that off if they don't get fully funded.
Doesn't anyone realize that the first line of defense for a bureaucracy is to find the most important program and threaten to kill it if it doesn't get what it wants?
Like every time someone mentions selling public land, the first thing some policy wonk at the Dept of Interior mentions is selling off Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. The government could make millions from selling off land around ski resorts that no one would miss, but it will never happen because the bureaucrats will always threaten the worst case scenario. NPR is all too happy to play along, since they have the same problem. I'm sure NPR could find 10% of their operating budget to cut and still provide 95% or more of their current offerings, but instead they go for the jugular and threaten to kill Garrison Keillor.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
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
Here's a novel idea...start charging for access to the weather satellite data.
I'd pay $1/mo for being able to access the weather forecast...and there are what? 300,000,000 Americans? That should be enough to keep the damn satellites up. If not, charge $2/mo.
There's no place like
Well, your military blew up the bridges in the first place. How about you cut out the middle process of blowing up other people's bridges, then you don't have to consider the cost of rebuilding them? Depends on your priorities I suppose. Blowing up other countries infrastructures and not rebuilding them is one solution, but this may lead to a lot of disaffected, disadvantaged people who might see the solution as coming over to the USA and blowing up US people in revenge. Bombing people back into the stone age leaves a lot of stone age people who might take stone age solutions get out of their poverty...
Currently your military spending is ten times larger than the second biggest military power in the world. If you scaled it down a little bit then that would pay for the satellites.
That's only part of it. The rest choose to create new companies, or even better choose to take less salary (the ones who are paid salaries) and less bonus (which is a good thing because it leaves more money in the corporation for investment and dividends).
I'm not a Keynesian. Economists are dangerous people. I'm just pointing out a trend, and I'm saying that cutting taxes has never helped an economy, and cutting government spending in a recession (or depression) is destructive.
That was my first response too when I saw the graphs, but if you look at the period post-Great Depression, each and every time it was the "good times" that followed the changes in tax rates on the top brackets, not the other way around.
Strange, no?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Either that or some people have a more nuanced view.
There is a point where abortion becomes nasty, since it is a fully developed child who could survive outside the mother. This is why parital birt abortion is nasty, and pretty much anyone, Democrat or not will agree.
When the debate gets silly is when people decide that 5-100 undifferentiated cells are somehow imbued with magic because of their subjective religious beleifs that not everyone is our society agrees with. When the only basis to your argument is subjective religion, then your argument holds no weight over people who don't accept that, and thus you really shouldn't be allowed to force those subjective views on others.
If you are a religious person of the stripe who thinks that undifferentiated cell masses are magical (and somehow more important than the person bearing them, in some cases), then don't terminate them. Its as simple as that. Yes, we do need some regulation when it comes to aborting fully developed fetus, which have developed nervous systems and can survive (albeit with technology) outside of the mother.
Further, it gets truly insane when people hold anti-abortion to the point where you aren't allowed to remove a dead fetus, to the risk of the mother. People who hold these beliefs are so blanketed in their own irrational dogma to the point where we don't really even have to listen to them anymore. That view makes no sense from the religious or rational views.
But... if your vote, and political identification is based purely on this (and generally a bit of hatred for "teh gays" thrown in for flavor), then you really don't have very well formed views. There are millions of other issues much more important for the whole of the American people than enforcing your religious dogma on others.
(as a point of clarity: I'm mostly against abortion, since, outside of health, carrying it to term and putting it up for adoption is ethically superior, at least to my ethical system. But I'm never in favor of legislating behaviors unless there is clear harm, since that path opens the door to tyranny and theocracy.)
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Shut the fuck up you goddamned worthless conservative shitrag. Conservative shitrags like you, cowardly little punks who post AC, have fucked this country up so badly that we may never recover. And conservative shitrags love stupid government programs, like ethanol subsidies, which are championed by conservative shitrag senators such as Charles Grassley of Iowa and Sam Brownback of Kansas. Oh, and it was a conservative shitrag congress and president that gave us No Child Left Behind, the Department of Homeland Security and the War in Iraq. Conservatives have zero credibility in making statements like this, which of course is why they always post this nonsense as AC. The last fiscally responsible Republican president we had was George H.W. Bush, and for his attempts to balance the budget he was knifed in the back by his own party.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.