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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.'"
NBC / weather channel / comcast has deep pockets may they can pay for one.
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.
Probably because the measurement data from Russia or China would not be too useful. Note the following bit from the summary (emphasis by me): "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."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
They probably still have a shitload of high-resolution equipment above the US anyway. Might as well get some money out of it.
Because the data would be in funny characters and the units would be in metric units and Americans would not understand it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The new weather satalites will access The Cloud to speed deployment and reduce support costs.
I'll bet any amount that the people that designed and built the old satellites are not around anymore. "Next generation" is industry speak for "We have to start all over again.". Of course, I have no facts to back this up.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
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.
Perhaps not but the US Department of Defense seems to toss up satellites with cameras on a regular basis. I'm at a bit of a loss to understand why this is so hard. The basic sensing suite should be well established by now. Satellite technology is well established. Certainly there is room for research - better sensors, more communications and whatnot but getting a garden variety weather satellite out just ought not to be so hard.
Maybe give it to the pros (DOD) or JPL or maybe even Elon Musk. Further, I have to believe with all the money we've spent on military satellites, they don't have spare weather sats sitting in a warehouse someone....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
Nice strawman. I agree that the first post was bullshit but these satellites are needed and aren't an example of excessive government spending. The excellent storm forecasts we've had over the past decade came about due to these satellites. Lives and property have been saved. When there is a satellite gap, people who are used to knowing if a hurricane or a derecho is going to hit them 3 days in advance will be surprised when they have almost no notice. People who are used to knowing if the next winter storm is going to be an icestorm will be surprised when they get 2 inches of ice instead of 2 ft of snow.
...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
If you really want to save money have China build the satellites. They might even launch them in geosynchronous orbit over the US for free.
Why are we building meteorological satellites when we have the Weather Channel?
Why do we need "next generation" satellites? Why not build more of the same, which apparently have worked adequately for quite a while?
Car Analogy Warning: When fuel is your biggest cost, the price difference between launching a Model-T into orbit isn't really that relevant compared to launching a ferrari.
There's also the whole "technology improving" thing.
Imagine the current state of science if we were only using microscopes that "have worked adequately for quite a while"
Heck, feel free to compare and contrast a 1999 cell phone with one made in 2010.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I agree... we should let corporations tell us when weather is bad.
Because paying for information to be told a tornado is coming is a good idea.
Paying to be told a hurricane is coming is a good idea.
Preventing loss of life should be secondary to profits.
Also, none of that is bribing to save lives, its just good business.
If only we were less short sighted than profits and more caring about people. But fuck it, PROFITS!
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.
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.
Technically we did collectively pay to be told a hurricane is coming. The current satellites were paid for with taxes and we paid taxes. Continuing operation of the satellite (which does require constant regular human intervention, because oddly enough, maintaining an orbit isn't automatic) is also paid for with taxes, and that is an ongoing expense. So yes, sarcasm aside, paying to be told a hurricane is coming IS a good idea and we ARE paying for it, all the time, and we should and indeed must continue paying for it.
Your great wagonloads of sarcasm are appropriate for the concept that it would be a good idea to introduce a profit motive into that situation, but I think it bears repeating that we are in fact paying--we are paying with taxes, and this is one of the reasons why government is good and taxes are necessary; it's how we successfully keep the profit motive out of things which are deadly dangerous when operated for profit.
(I leave the application of the concept to healthcare as an exercise for the reader.)
Feel free to compare NASA's budget 2 decades ago with todays budget. Its about the same. Somehow the technology in the space sector has gotten more expensive over time, unlike the cell phones that you are talking about.
The space shuttle only cost $1.7 billion per craft and only $450 million per launch.. thats the fucking space shuttle!! Now a few weather satellites cost $13 billion to make and deploy? These is corporations gorging themselves at the trough of runaway government deficits.
"His name was James Damore."
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 ----
Corporations have incentive to provide timely, accurate information as long as there's competition. The government, on the other hand, don't give a crap about efficiency they only care about effectiveness. Much more bang for your buck with commercial launch and with commercial satellites. Weather satellites are a national defense issue but this could be farmed out to companies...the launch business is mostly companies the government contracts out to so why not weather satellites? Ask yourself, when's the last time the government did something and you were amazed at how little it cost.
Or have we reached you too late after you've drank the liberal Kool-Aid? Think for yourself and stop regurgitating the lies. Repeat after me (in a non-zombie-like voice), "companies not inherently bad...government not inherently good...fire hot..."
It's a brilliant example of one category of tragedy of the commons. The dollars spent are easily seen and tracked. The dollars saved are invisible.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
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.
Not that I want to get in the way of a rant with momentum (+5? Really?), but you do realize that at present the vast majority of people in the United States get their warnings about bad weather, approaching tornados, and hurricanes heading towards shore, from their local television and radio stations? You do realize that the vast majority of them are commercial enterprises? You know: ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, the Weather Channel, etc.? You do realize what those organizations are, don't you? They are called "corporations," and I haven't noticed any mass slaughter going on due to lack of warning - quite the opposite. But it gets worse - the satellites that provide the weather information - built by corporations under contract. There is a growing chance that the next weather satellites will be carried into orbit by commercial space lift - rockets owned and operated by corporations. Still worse, the warnings about bad weather are transmitted on commercial equipment, in some cases on commercial communications satellites. The horror! How is it that we manage to avoid daily disaster, given your thinking? Is it possible there is a piece of the puzzle you aren't accounting for? (One piece? More than that I think.)
"Government" is just a word for things we do together. "Corporation" is just a word for things we do together voluntarily. -- David Burgeâ@iowahawkblog
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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.
Space launch is something that costs billions of dollars. That's why the government uses commercial companies to help them out after the government-only launch programs stagnated years ago. Who is able to "put their money where there mouth is" regarding space launch or satellite design/build/deploy? If I did then why would I be posting on /. using a TRS-80?
The "liberal Kool-Aid" comment was referring to jhoegl's post that sounded like a Democratic talking paper. Didn't mean to jump the rails but comments like that really wear me down, unfortunately they are far too common as we're inundated with commercials and talking points ad nauseam.
I stand by the fact the government's role is not to design, build, launch, and operate satellites the boosters and the launch facilities. The government's role is to to state the strategic vision of the country, put incentives in place for corporations to meet those needs (unless military specific like GPS [originally] or DSP), and get out of the way.
http://www.af.mil/information/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=96
Errr... you have a point insofar as people more or less ignoring NOAA's own weather reports in preference to commercial alternatives goes, but you're dead wrong about satellites and radar. Those commercial stations depend upon the constellation of satellites and array of radar sites that are operated by NOAA, regardless of whether the actual construction was done by a government employee or contracted out to someone.
Yes, there are a few TV stations that have their own X-band weather radar, but they're mostly eye candy for the local audience (limited range, limited features). For their real forecasting work, they grab the level 2 data from NOAA's radar. You can argue about the need for NOAA's meteorologists, but you'd have to be completely delusional to think their data reconnaissance services could be adequately replaced by commercial alternatives. Not even The Weather Channel has the resources to send out the hurricane hunter planes, let alone maintain its own constellation of satellites and operate an array of radar sites with anything close to the scope and capabilities of NEXRAD and TDWR.
Would a 100% commercial enterprise be more efficient? Certainly. However, efficiency isn't everything. Availability matters, too. It's "efficient" (for the profits of an investor-owned power company) to just accept rolling blackouts for a day or two per year, instead of "over-building" their capacity to make sure it never, ever happens. That doesn't change the fact that it really sucks to be in one of those areas when the blackouts happen, and the cost of coming up with your own backup power is several orders of magnitude more than what it would have cost in higher monthly bills had the network just been engineered to a higher standard in the first place. A private company would roll the dice and risk the loss of a satellite or two for a few years, even though the marginal cost of the spares (spread across ~300 million taxpayers) is next to nothing. A private company can't do that, because it only has a few (compared to 300 million) paying customers, so the extra satellite goes from an extra cent or two per year in taxes to doubled (or more) monthly/annual subscription fees.
Plus, I should probably point out that weather affects interstate commerce in a major way, and is probably one of the most constitutionally-unambiguous responsibilities OF the federal government to handle.
In any case, if you think a spare satellite or two is expensive, take a wild guess how much it would cost to relocate SBX-1 to some location in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, or 200 miles off the east coast between Jacksonville and Cape Hatteras, to do stand-in duty as the most expensive weather radar platform in the history of meteorology (not to mention the damage it would almost certainly sustain if it were literally put in the path of a half-dozen hurricanes in a single year).