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Going Off the Fiscal Cliff Could Mean Missing the Next Hurricane Sandy
Lasrick writes "Alex Knapp has an excellent article pointing out that NOAA satellites enabled NOAA to predict the 'left hook' of Hurricane Sandy into the Eastern Seaboard, which in turn enabled local governments to prepare. Those satellites are at risk and there will be a gap of about a year between 2017 and 2018, when the old ones fail and the new ones are scheduled to launch. There's no alternative to getting that data, and the so-called 'fiscal cliff' will drive an 8% cut to NOAA's satellite program, so that those replacement satellites may go up even later than 2018."
Just ask Kim YoungOne for some data from the North Korean satellites. They will clearly be ahead of NASA by then! :-)
Doesn't the USA military have any satellites capable of filling the temporary gap in NOAA ones?
Military weather is classified, you insensitive clod.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If you have a better idea, please elaborate. For some reason completely oblivious to you, preparation against catastrophic events costs money.
Disclaimer: I worked on a sat program for a met office.
Weather forecasts are usually made by combining many sources of data from literally thousands of instruments. Ground sensors, weather balloons, satellites and such all contribute. If the current weather forecasting models depend on a certain type of information from certain satellites, it will take years to re-calibrate them to data from other satellites that are constructed differently. It may be that some types of data from CriS under certain circumstances are more accurate, but that doesn't mean that it will be compatible or adaptable to the current software being used to make the forecasts.
The second problem is that there is only one CriS that orbits the planet in 14 parts, only coming back to a location about once a day. The NOAA satellites are geostationary and there are two. Together, they can do 24/7 covering of the USA. For weather forecasts, especially for short term hurricane directions that matter for evacuation alerts and such, you can't have just once in 24 hour coverage, you want 15 minute updates.
CriS is certainly a nice instrument, but it's totally inadequate to replace the geostationary satellites NOAA has, since it's function and trajectory are totally not suitable for what the NOAA birds are for.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
What are you going to do, shoot at the hurricanes? I mean, sure they do have "eyes", but, well, you're going to be dissapointed. And wet.
If you read TFA, you'd know the big concern isn't that the satellites are going to stop working, but that the expertise needed to design, build and operate the replacement satellites will retire or move on. This is a real concern.
People who've never run an engineering project think you can take a project that is budgeted to cost X dollars, put it on hold when you've spent 0.7X dollars for some arbitrary length of time, then pick it up much later and finish it for 0.3X dollars. It doesn't work that way. Every time you restart a project it's can be logistically like starting from scratch -- sometimes even worse. I've had customers who take deliverables and sit on them from months. Since I can't keep my team sitting on its hands for months I put the team on something else. Then suddenly the customer signs off on the deliverables and wants work on the next phase to start right away. The team has to refamiliarize itself with the project and figure out what they were up to and why -- if the team is still intact.
Delay is a potent driver of cost overruns and a major source of quality problems.
In any case, this kind of reason drives me nuts. Yes, a solid, conservative piece of engineering often exceeds its design specs. In fact, it's surprising if it doesn't. So you can expect a satellite with a ten year planned lifetime not to conk out at ten years and a day unless you are very unlucky, *but you don't factor that into your planning* otherwise design specs mean nothing. The "happy accident" of a system outperforming its specification is no accident, it's the product of respecting the boundaries of what can be guaranteed.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you have a better idea, please elaborate. For some reason completely oblivious to you, preparation against catastrophic events costs money.
The problem I have is that when times are good, governments spend the excess on crap, and then when it comes time to make cuts, they whine about how they'll have to cut essential services. We see it all the time with local governments as property taxes fluctuate. When revenues are down they say they have to cut police and fire departments and teachers, but there's never any talk about cutting what was _added_ during the fat years. We always had teachers and police and fire departments during the previous lean years, so what's the problem with going back to how it was?
We're seeing the same thing on the federal level, the difference being that there haven't been good times (ie: surplus) in over a decade. Replace "good times" with "when we're borrowing even more from China."
We had money to fund NOAA before the current people in charge borrowed more money than all previous administrations combined, why can't we go back to that? I think that's what the GP is getting at.
If they are so essential, why is there ALREADY a planned one year satellite gap?
You're operating under the flawed assumption that congress has the public's best interest in mind. There was no PLANNED one year satellite gap, you fucking fool.
Here, from June, 2012:
Congressional budget cutting will delay the launch of a key weather satellite and hinder tracking of killer hurricanes, tornadoes and other severe weather, officials warn.
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The satellite, which had been scheduled to launch in 2016, will be postponed 18 months because of spending cuts and delays. The threat during that gap is that National Weather Service forecasts will become fuzzier, with the paths of hurricanes and tornadoes even less predictable.
With more budget cuts looming, further delays are possible — something President Obama alluded to last week.
"There will be a data gap. That data gap will have very serious consequences to our ability to do severe storm warnings, long-term weather forecasts, search and rescue and good weather forecasts," Jane Lubchenco, NOAA administrator, told members of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in April.
Forecasters issued warnings five days ahead of tornadoes that struck Tuscaloosa, Ala., and five other states in April. A barrage of 312 tornadoes swept across the Southeast, killing 321 people. On storm day, forecasters gave warnings averaging 27 minutes before actual touchdowns.
Likewise, when a tornado struck Joplin, Mo., killing 151 on May 22, forecasters gave warnings averaging 24 minutes before strikes.
"The satellites are an important part of that early warning process," said Christopher Vaccaro, a spokesman for the service.
Lubchenco said without information from the polar satellite, forecasts for a massive storm nicknamed "snowmageddon," which hit Washington in February 2010, would have had the location wrong by 200 to 300 miles and would have underestimated the snowfall by 10 inches. Hurricane tracking would also suffer, she said.
"Our severe storm warnings will be seriously degraded," Lubchenco testified April 1 before the House Appropriations subcommittee governing the agency.
Lawmakers and scientists lauded the value of the program, which provides forecasts for military troop deployments, ocean search-and-rescue missions and farmers tending crops.
"It's important for public safety," said Christine McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union. Cutting the funding "would be penny-wise and pound-foolish."
Lubchenco credited the satellites with helping save 295 people in 2010 by helping track rescue beacons aboard ships.
"That's saving lives, that's saving money," said Rep. Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the House panel that oversees NOAA funding.
But reduced federal spending threatens all domestic programs. Congress cut spending $38.5 billion in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. House Republicans propose to cut another $30 billion next year.
So, there was never a planned gap. The damn funding got cut, and now it's getting cut some more. What's the point of having scientists advise on these issues if they get ignored? Fuck them, and fuck you. Can't prioritize anything or even look at the data and reason for yourselves. Go sleep in a tar-pit, you dickheads are hindering the herd.
On others, that is. The fiscal cliff thing is just idiotic: basically, it came about because congress would not agree to pay for the budget it had voted for and set itself an ultimatum so terrifying that it would have to get its collective act together.
It turns out that the amount of pain the Congress is ready to inflict on random individuals who were just unlucky is very, very large. And this thread is full of crazies thinking it is oh-so-brave to cut funding for weather (they leave far from the hurrican paths), to stop giving money to the unemployed (they themselves have a cushy job they think is entirely due to their hard work), to not give people health care (because cancer/car accidents are the product of bad lifestyle -- always. Also, they themselves have good insurance).
So maybe the US deserves to go over the cliff and have a good 3 point of GDP recession. After all, the economy is doing so well... Or maybe the American electorate needs to pull the plug on the Republicans and the Libertards. Then the Democracts can be split into a centre right and a centre left party.
How is this Insightful? How about -1 Trite. Is it that hard to believe that government can and does provide useful services, especially those that have such a long time horizon and capital investment that the market will not provide them? Is it also that hard to understand that these valuable programs and the people who run them (at a huge discount relative to the private sector) suffer under the vagaries of political brinksmanship?
How much does one launch cost? How much does it cost to blow up innocent people (women and children included though I value them neither more nor less than males) by drone just about every day of the year.
I really don't know where my priorities are at -- what the fuck is wrong with me for valuing interesting scientific data over blowing up random people and making enemies of the survivors.
Yeah -- a big FUCK YOU to that. It's totally warranted and really, not even a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of percent harsh enough for the total FUCKHEADS in WA DC.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Well, the most recent spending boom by the Federal Government was for two badly executed invasions and a bunch "Homeland Security" BS. I agree with you, let's cut out that BS and get back to the 90's.
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Government cannot keep growing indefinitely (which is what it's doing at the moment).
Based on what metric?
Peak government employment? That was back in the 70s or 80s. Even now, government employment rolls are DOWN. That's right, lots of government employees have been laid off since the economy went sour. And Obama still has less people working for him than Reagan did.
http://www.opm.gov/feddata/historicaltables/totalgovernmentsince1962.asp
Per Capita spending? Adjusted for inflation, it's not actually significantly higher, unless you mindlessly include tax cuts as spending.
So please, tell us how you've concluded government is growing, and on what terms. Give us some sources.
Or just mindlessly claim something is happening, and don't make the effort to be sure your words are true.
We had money to fund NOAA before the current people in charge borrowed more money than all previous administrations combined, why can't we go back to that?
We blew the largest part of our budget surplus on the Bush Tax Cuts, the second largest part on the two wars, and the third largest part on stimulus and all of this, including the stimulus, was spent before the current people in charge took office. Under Obama we did spend additional money on stimulus, but all of that stimulus spending together, including stimulus tax cuts, are still less than the Bush Tax Cuts. Even if you believe that the stimulus spending was ill advised (which seems to be at odds with the results) the answer to the issue you raise about why we had money for NOAA before but not now is clear: we didn't. We never had the money to spend on those tax cuts, and all of the budgetary pain that we're going through now is the result.
Plus, both the President Bush and President Obama Tax cuts were supply side biased, and the Bank/Mortgage bailouts were 100% supply side* Togther these represent 4 really huge commitments to test the theory behind trickle down/supply side and they have failed disasterously every single time. So listening to the people who backed and continue to back supply side at all is like listening to a doctor who still advocates bleeding the patients, shaking rattles at them to drive off evil spirits, and treating Malaria with crocodile dung. Whatever will actually help the economy, it's NOT going to come from the Supply-siders.
* The tax cuts were biased about 2 to 1 for supply side - that is, economists on all sides of the issue agreed that the individual consumers were together driving about 69 to 70 % of all spending, and NOBODY who studied sales figures came up with another number, but both years tax cuts paid out about 35 % to individual consumers and 65 % to the supply side minority, in the form of accelerated business depreciation. The Mortgage bailouts were very close to 100% supply side - the only way they really could have been demand side was directly paying off bad loans to let people keep their houses. That's what supply side and demand side mean. You know all the right wing guys who are claiming these bailouts are socialist? That they are a bigger problem than the two off-the-books wars? They were also exactly what the right advocated, and got. When some idiots try something four times, for what they themselves have claimed were the four largest single expenditures ever by any nation, and then they themselves claim it made the economy worse in the end, why is anyone still listening to them?
Note: I'm not claiming here that Keynesians or the real Socialists or any other particular economic theorists are definitely right and have all the answers, but if they are all wrong, at least in part, the supply-siders and trickle-downers and so on are definitively so much more totally wrong, we need some whole new ideas in economics. Deciding, for example, the Keynesians are wrong, without first spending as much as just one of the bailouts or stimuli to test it, and then testing supply side four times without learning anything, is all the proof anyone half rational needs that some of our economists and politicians are quacks at best, brutal, child-destroying, war-mongering monsters at the worst still reasonable interpretation, and criminals by the same sort of standards we would not hesitate to apply to a profession such as engineering or medicine.
Who is John Cabal?