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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.'"
I hope you major party partisan bitches reap what you have sown. It serves you assholes right.
Down with the one party system!
Why not lease or buy the data from the Russians & the Chinese while we're getting the new ones into orbit... Cheaper and would get the job, or at least some of it, done. 2c
NBC / weather channel / comcast has deep pockets may they can pay for one.
Yeah, this coming from someone who has never forecast a day of weather in her life, and doesn't know what the National Weather Service does in the first place...
There are so many "checks and balances" in the system, and so much risk aversion, that the system can not perform. No program manager is ever rewarded for taking a risk, or succeeding, so the best ones are the ones who can redirect blame and reduce risk. Same with the contracting and finance people, and to no small extent, the government engineers. Worse, those who are competent flee the government, leaving us with a population that's not good or representative of their fields at large. I wasn't given the option to enter it (military orders) but I'm leaving as soon as I can, because it's a dead end, morally, emotionally and professionally.
Why do we need "next generation" satellites? Why not build more of the same, which apparently have worked adequately for quite a while?
I hope you major party partisan bitches reap what you have sown. It serves you assholes right.
Down with the one party system!
cue the "Kif sigh" from Futurama.
FTFA:
The project is run by the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, and NASA.
There's your problem. NASA and the NOAA ?!?! Putting it ALL under the NOAA, where it belongs, would clear up a lot of shit. And then there's this horseshit ...
In response, top Commerce and NOAA officials on Sept. 18 ordered what they called an urgent restructuring — just the latest overhaul of the troubled program. They streamlined the management, said they would fill major vacancies quickly and demanded immediate reports on how the agency planned to cope with the gap.
OMFG! This will have absolutely no effect - whatsoever. All they did was fire some mid-levels - peons who have no real say and it was really for show - but the real problems are still working there (Hint: they're are the ones at the top.).
What needs to be done is for the military and industry (industry clients - NOT the suppliers) to get their bitches in the Senate to restructure this whole thing from the top down.
That will get it funded and running in no time.
22 comments in and not one reference to whether or not Netcraft has confirmed the satellites are dying.
Slashdot is definitely slipping.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
are on the one side glad to support our allies on our axis, but must decline the shipment of data that might harm the religious feelings of many american citizens.
Weather is made by god, man shall not try to understand gods ways, because this would make man a god. Thus weather shall not be understood by the god fearing american people that replace a theory like evolution or the big bang theory by simpler means; creative design and the not so "creative beginning".
A just kidding, take as much data as you need, because if you fear for your life you also sell your soul, aren't you ?
Yes, but are they scared or sad that they are dying?
Better known as 318230.
A proper weather satellite would control the weather, rather than simply observe it.
Then I could write my name in snow, across an entire continent.
Muhahahaha.
Is Dying. Does anyone know of any other site that are similar too what slashdot was 5-years ago?
...when you over-spend on military interventions and bullying the world, and under-spend on useful tech.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Why are we building meteorological satellites when we have the Weather Channel?
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Its a fact. We need to stop collecting data that might disprove it.
Two reasons: 1st is that it's not that simple. Systems engineering is actually very complex and difficult. That's the technical reason most large computer projects and all large DoD projects fail. Incremental change is a good approach, but by replacing a substantial amount of the old tech (bus and sensor) you're basically re-designing the satellite, re-qualifying the system, and eating most of the expense and a large fraction of the risk that would come from starting from scratch, and you might not actually meet the current requirements.
Second: Given incompetent program management in an acquisition system that's designed to prevent any risk, the program will most certainly fail.
Europe just launched a brandy new fancy weather satellite. I wonder if there is a little bit of envy going on here. Things are great when we just got brand new stuff but then time goes by and then other people get newer stuff and then our stuff isn't so cool anymore.
The Magellanic cloud hereby invites you to a party. Also attending will be the Oort cloud, the Milky Way gas clouds, a molecular cloud from Andromeda, and an alcohol cloud of considerable refinement*. CHON will be served. Entertainment will be provided by black holes stripping electrons.
*Only those from planets understood to be older than 6000 years may attend.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We have a complete set of functional weather satellites at the ready. The military has their own even more sophisticated constellation that can provide equivalent information, if its information is "blurred" a bit. Think GPS as a more extreme analog where there aren't any civilian satellites at all. Why does the military run its own weather program? It routes flights, navigates seas, secures facilities and does a lot of off-roading to schedule and needs to prepare for expected challenges, just like you do when you commute to work and back home, and while you're on vacation.
"chronic management problems". Maybe that's what all the bullets are for?
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
Our weather satellites are dying, Senator. We must do something quickly to stop the loss of long term forecasts.
Mesa day startin pretty okee-day with a brisky morning munchy, then BOOM! Gettin very scared and runnin from that lightning, and POW! Mesa here! Mesa gettin' very very scared! Flashy lightning not insa forecast!
So NOAA made an agreement with the government of Germany to borrow a Meteosat Weather Satellite as a backup
Are you sure about this? Trusting our fate to a satellite we hardly know?
The mismanagement of the $13 billion program to build the next generation weather satellites was recently described as a 'national embarrassment'
“American politics. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
“These forecasts — too accurate for Farmer's Almanacs. Only weather satellites are so precise.”
“If this is a weather station, where is the meteorologist? — Commander, tear this place apart until you’ve found those satellite plans.”
...bridges, roads, highways and satellites crumble away because nobody wants to pay their fucking taxes.
Film at 11.
See? More evidence that the government should get out of the satellite weather monitoring business and let private industry take care of it.
[lawl]
Huge overlap in many of their respective missions.
After merging them, fund them. They account for a drop in the bucket of the entire budget so to speak.
I'll probably get some troll points for this, but after watching the recent Frontline titled Climate of Doubt, I wonder if there aren't some pretty powerful forces out there that just plain don't want weather/climate data all that much. The interviews in that show seem to indicate that the big money behind that effort (which over the last four years has somehow convinced half of the U.S. population that man made climate change is a myth, while science has gone in the opposite direction), is way more about Ayn Randian ideology than science.
All pretty scary if you ask me...like we're getting closer and closer to witch burning every day...
"Tornados also give you wings!" Cut to 30 second commercial.
Or we are too busy spending $1 Trillion a year on welfare. When you entire reelection strategy consists of giving out money to the majority of people while taking it from the minority, you don't have money for things like weather satelites or manned space missions.
It has nothing to do with people wanting less data. In fact "deniers" tried for over a decade to get more data from the CRU in England before Phil Jones deleted so no one else could peer review his research. If anything "deniers" are the ones trying to actually get and share more data because they tend to be interested in facts and truth, not smoke and mirrors backed by denied FOI requests.
Or at least ones that know their limitations and have good advisors to turn to when they hit those limits so they can make informed decisions.
Not eveyone knows everything.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The CRU data has been available for a while now. What have the "deniers" done with it, exactly ?
the skeptics are conspiracy theorists? ... I wish you guys would make up your mind
... since they're exactly the same as white people, just as intelligent as us, and having a few hundred million more of them living in white countries won't destroy them in any way whatsoever.
So, when are blacks going to launch their first satellite? Anybody?
Welfare? Can you explain to me how welfare is costing $1 Trillion a year? Or are you mistaken, and thinking of Social Security?
Hold on, you're echoing the Idiot Republican talking points.
They didn't want his data. They wanted everything else so they could hang him with lies and insinuation.
Nope, according to Congressional accounting, welfare, not including SS or Medicare, has hit $1 Trillion this year. I believe that now makes it the biggest program in Federal spending. That comes to an average of $60,000 per family in poverty. The amazing thing being that $60,000 is triple the poverty line and STILL 15% of familys are below the poverty line.
So no, I am not mistaken.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/over-60000-welfare-spentper-household-poverty_657889.html
Sorry I couldn't find a CBS/ABC/CNN source for you, but since they are all in election mode for Obama this month they are basically refusing to report anything that could possibly hurt his reelection chances.
But you know as well as I do that we aren't giving each of them $60K annually. In fact, they explicitly included Medicare to inflate the number.
I'm trying to find a corroborating analysis but there's lots of noise from the "we hate Obama" camps. In fact, whenever I try to search on welfare to get any numbers I get Fox News, Heritage, and Cato, all well known neoconservative think tanks and media organizations that hate Obama more than anything else. Further searching does nothing to support your numbers, but does pull in madhouses like Free Republic.
But the truth is that you're angry that the lower 50% of this country is in need of assistance because wages are so bad and jobs are so scarce for them. Not because things are so bad for them, but because this takes money away from the super rich whose taxes, quite frankly, should be higher. The true solution rather than just forcing people into abject poverty would be to give them jobs, but the people at the helm of the companies I noted above are busy ensuring that there are as few good paying jobs out there as possible.
Idiot neoconservative persecution complex. Of course, that's why you linked me to a neoconservative website that's all-in on Mitt Romney (or whoever is the Republican candidate) and anti-Obama (for not being Republican.)
Of course, what would you rather spend it on? Bombs and guns? Or would you just ensure that it's given back to the richest in this country so they can sit on it while sending more jobs out of the country while continuing to whine about taxes?
The polar orbiting satellites are the quiet achievers of weather forecasting. Everyone sees the geostationary sat images on TV and think that's it, but there's a lot more going on with the polar sats.
They orbit north/south over the poles at about 800km. They are sun-synchronous (so the sun is always behind them illuminating the earth on their daylight run) and they do an orbit about every 90 minutes or so. The earth turns underneath them as they orbit, so they cover the entire globe. The current POES status is here
They transmit a heap of data - the data I receive here in Australia is the APT transmissions, which is 4 x 4 km per pixel resolution images in the visible and IR wavelength, which run constantly. As the satellite clears the horizon, you pick up the signal at two lines per second and about 15 minutes later on a directly overhead pass it sets again and you've got a nice, 2000km x 4000km image of your immediate area, just like if it came off a fax machine. The two wavelengths offered in the analog mode give you a visible image and allow you to read temperatures, so you can find thunderheads and cold fronts, for example. The APT transmissions just require a 137Mhz FM receiver and a simple antenna to pick up, so it's easy to get images.
They also have a digital mode - HRPT - with the entire range of 6 imaging sensors onboard and 1x1km per pixel resolution and you can do a lot with that - highlight vegetation, measure and and sea surface temps, locate and track fires and such.
Onboard there are also charge sensors for measuring auroral densities, and you can visit a webpage that shows the current auroral activity. The satellites can also receive, process and retransmit data from Search and Rescue beacon transmitters, and automatic data collection platforms on land, ocean buoys, or aboard free-floating balloons, as well as detect and map the ozone holes that appear yearly over the poles.
Their capabilities completely outclass the geosynchronous satellites and I hope that NOAA gets their act together and back on track with the launches.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Our elected representatives (I don't care which party you support) have:
- refused to BALANCE THE BUDGET, ie their main job
- chosen superficial feel-good measures ahead of everything else
- continue to rabidly borrow for everything
- cut all long term investment in favor of more bread, more circuses
- for the last 30 years they've passed measures that cut taxes or raise spending today, with 'promised cuts' or 'promised revenues' later that never seem to arrive.
We don't have enough $$ coming in to pay our commitments.
Instead of (the quickest route) cutting spending, we begin debating who we should take more money from, as if tax revenue is inexhaustible.
How is this at all surprising?
-Styopa
Oh Good
Can I get invited to the funeral?
Funerals can be fun... if you know how
It appears you are the angry one. I specifically pointed out we spend the equivalent of $60,000 per poverty family (triple the poverty limit) YET still have 15% living in poverty. The point being if we just GAVE it to them no one would be in poverty. However, we are spending that money and STILL not helping people.
How much would you suggest spending on poverty? $2 Trillion a year, $3 Trillion a year? It isn't working. As a matter of fact, since welfare began poverty was at around 15%, so in addition to not helping its not helping one tiny bit.
I'll come to the conclusion I always do discussing things with liberals. Once they give up on facts and turn to name calling I consider it a win for me on the topic at hand. You have just lost completely and fully and shown everyone else who reads this that not only has liberalism lost, it has lost in a manner that it can't even come up with a cognative point to refute its complete failure. Liberalism is the lack of helping others and showing bigotry and intollerance for other people's opinins.
You silly class warfare people. How many times fo I have to tell you that the stockholders need that money!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I presume that someone is already 'guilty' of not getting this right ('this' being "able to see into the future" and predicting the need for weather satellites) so, the person(s) need to be charged, found giulty, and incarcerated. After all, that will always make a positive impression on scientists and engineers, as it did recently in Italy. This also applies to those responsible for the launcher, and the weather forecasters who clear the launch window, the space-junk trackers who clear the window, and so on...... :-)
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
And you're quoting crap numbers that are being spouted exclusively throughout the neoconservative echo chamber. Take Medicare out of it, and its way smaller. And this goes back into the healthcare cost fiasco that the Republican party absolutely refuses to allow to be solved.
Perhaps that's because just throwing money at the problem like this won't solve it. People fall into poverty because costs for everything rise but their wages are stagnant.
Welfare isn't supposed to reduce poverty. It's to keep those who are suffering from poverty or are at risk from starving or living in their cars or on the streets.
Which is what, exactly? Give up, mumble something, claim "victory" and run away? There's a reason you're posting as an Anonymous Coward. Like that lady on CNN who screamed that Obama was a communist, but was mentally incapable of defending her irrational, baseless statement when pressed and ran away.
Nonsense. Your point is utterly ridiculous and full of holes. You scream that something is a problem, use a number arrived at via bad means deliberately designed to rile the base up, and offer no solutions whatsoever. None. And you expect to be taken seriously.
What? You made no point to refute! You simply spout an invalid number and use it as an excuse to do what? Cut welfare? Why? What will you do with the people whose welfare you cut? "Make them get jobs?" What jobs? What will you do about the richest in this nation who move jobs out of the country? People end up on welfare because they can't support themselves for some reason and while I'm sure you console yourself by thinking "it's cause they're lazy" I am pretty sure that there are millions of people out there who WANT to work but can't because the jobs aren't there, or ARE working but are still suffering from poverty because the pay is crap.
No. That's just your twisted, self-centered view on those who reject your destructive worldview, namely that cutting taxes is the only solution, the poor should live in their cars (if they have them), the sick should die in the streets, and the only thing that matters are corporate profits and the size of the portfolios of the richest in the nation.
The crowd that insists that government is the problem, and we shouldn't be spending money on anything that is only understood by an educated elite, and sending things into space is a waste (as if we grind up the money and throw it up there), has kept un-funding things. Oddly enough a lot of them come from farming and natural-resource states where whether predictions can make a huge difference.
:-)
OTOH corporate interests should be enticed, by allowing them to advertise support. Get the people making cameras that survive crazy sports stunts involved in putting their stuff a little higher.
OTOOH maybe all the weather broadcasters should start paying for the images and information NOAA produces, like the GPS and map websites have to pay for map information (and spend their own money on their own camera crews).
From TFA:
The mismanagement of the $13 billion program to build the next generation weather satellites ...
Would someone please provide a link to the above quote?
And can someone please explain to us why is there no one has been punished for the $13 Billion loss due to mismanagement ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
than a year or 5 years. The economy is going to collapse from the excessive borrowing and ballooning of the interest rate on the debt, and we won't be launching ANY satellites for several decades, if ever again. If we get a debt up to 30, 40, 50 trillion, we'll likely never, ever be able to pay it off, and it will consume our entire economic output just to pay the interest. At that point, we become a 3rd world country. The only way out might be to simply cease to exist as the United States of America, and form a new country or several new countries that don't owe anything... I don't think there is any national equivalent to bankruptcy other than to cease to exist.
Yeah, let's go to Mars, a real smart use of space and money.
E Proelio Veritas.
The CRU data has been available for a while now. What have the "deniers" done with it, exactly ?
Let's just replace "deniers" with "critics", and use as our exemplar Steve McIntyre:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/04/25/cru-refuses-foi-request-for-yamal-climategate-chronology/ :
"Probably no single issue damages the reputation of the climate science community more than the refusal to show the data that supports their work, even under an FOI request. The public believes that scientists who purport to be concerned about the future of the planet should not place their own financial interests, including future grants, ahead of this concern, particularly when their research has been done with public funds.
Recently I sent an FOI request to the University of East Anglia for a regional chronology combining Yamal, Polar Urals and shorter (presumably Schweingruber) chronologies referred to in Climategate email 1146252894.txt, as well as a request for even a simple list of sites used to make the chronology. This request is for data that is central to Climategate. Yamal was in controversy in the days prior to Climategate. I drew particular attention to this issue and this series in my own submission. Unfortunately, the "inquiries" avoided the issue.
Not only did East Anglia refuse my request for the regional chronology, they even refused to identify the sites. The University claimed that even identifying the sites would result in "financial harm" to the university though an adverse impact on their "ability to attract research funding"."
Repairing satellites in orbit seems like a perfect job for the space shuttles. Get in synchronous orbit, open the cargo doors, use the robot arm to pluck the satellite our of orbit, fix it, then place it back in orbit. Too bad they retired them all.
NOAA & NASA funds were cut to the bone by a 3 out past four congresses that disliked climate change. This alone doesnt explain the who situation. Articles say that NOAA project management has not been that good.
Quiet! Why do you think the Administration hasn't funded the satellite replacements!
It's the same as having PDE-propelled Aurora aircraft standing in for the SR-71s, or HAARP standing in for.. well, you get the idea. When you have weather control, you can leave weather reconaissance to the European satellite community... let THEM put it on the Internet. Did you think Tesla and then Langmuir were just allowed to look stupid and incompetent?
Now all we need is a fancy Burson & Marstellar campaign, like the one for the technology behind the Say-'n-Bank initiative in the Clinton administration. You remember -- the one that used the old CIA technology for B of A's initiative: it picked your request for bank balance information or whatever off the fillings in your teeth, relayed it via the NRO constellation to those silver antennae rotating on the billboards, and only you could read the data there...
And accomplish just about everything with STRATOSPHERIC AUTONOMOUS AIRSHIPS, at a mere 25 miles out.
http://darinselby.1hwy.com/floattospace.html
http://darinselby.1hwy.com/NASASatelliteReEntryDanger.html
http://darinselby.1hwy.com/MonsterMarsRocket.html
http://darinselby.1hwy.com/4spaceprogramerrors.html