Our Weather Satellites Are Dying

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that some experts say it is almost certain that the U.S. will soon face a year or more without crucial weather satellites that provide invaluable data for predicting storm tracks. This is because the existing polar satellites are nearing or beyond their life expectancies, and the launching of the next replacement, known as JPSS-1, has slipped until early 2017. Polar satellites provide 84 percent of the data used in the main American computer model tracking the course of Hurricane Sandy, which at first was expected to amble away harmlessly, but now appears poised to strike the mid-Atlantic states. The mismanagement of the $13 billion program to build the next generation weather satellites was recently described as a 'national embarrassment' by a top official of the Commerce Department. A launch mishap or early on-orbit failure of JPSS 1 could lead to a data gap of more than 5 years. The second JPSS satellite — JPSS 2 — is not scheduled for launch until 2022. 'There is no more critical strategic issue for our weather satellite programs than the risk of gaps in satellite coverage,' writes Jane Lubchenco, the under-secretary responsible for the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. 'This dysfunctional program that had become a national embarrassment due to chronic management problems.' As a aside, I know from personal experience that this isn't the first time NOAA has been in this situation. 'In 1992 NOAA's GOES weather satellites were at the end of their useful lives and could have failed at any time,' I wrote as a project manager for AlliedSignal at that time. 'So NOAA made an agreement with the government of Germany to borrow a Meteosat Weather Satellite as a backup and drift it over from Europe to provide weather coverage for the US's Eastern seaboard in the event of an early GOES failure.'"

Comments

Re:Your one party system has failed you

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm quite certain this is coming from a pinko liberal asshat who is pissed off that the government isn't giving him unlimited money anymore to crank out 'crucial' satellites and research grants for 'global warming catastrophe' now that the guys with the big-boy pants are in charge. The world will do just fine knowing that a hurricane is on the way but not knowing the pressure to the nearest hundredth of a millibar or whether Shitsplat, Nebraska is currently has an above average or just slightly above average of precipitation in 2014 being above the 75 year average. There is point where something is useful, and then a point of diminishing returns where additional investments just are not justified and should be used elsewhere.

Wx Predicting... not all that good anyway

[fyngyrz]

The weather forecast for today, here? Wrong. Quite often is, even just one day out. Heck, a couple days ago they were saying 0% chance of snow yesterday... and it snowed all evening and night. This, in an area that gets, on average, about 10 inches of moisture total.

The forecast track for Sandy? And the amount of rain coming? And the actual wind impacts? Really quite uncertain -- and we certainly know where these things are (as opposed to where they're going to go) from non-satellite sources when they're closer to home. So we know they're near or here or maybe they're going to go somewhere -- and that's about all we know anyway.

I'm not saying it isn't a good idea to have satellites and to try to learn to predict the weather from them and every other source possible, of course it is, but I *am* saying that should we lack them for five years, I'm not going to see a significant difference in my quality of life, because weather prediction basically sucks in its current state.

It seems to me it's far more important to have doppler radar of high quality and close spacing so we know when severe weather is immanent.

So by all means launch the new sats, and hopefully it'll go well, but I can't see it as it significant WRT weather and me if it doesn't.

Now, if they actually could give reliable predictions... that'd be something else, because I'd be losing something of value. But we're just not there yet.