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Main US Weather Satellite Fails As Hurricane Season Looms
First time accepted submitter Rebecka writes with bad news, quoting an IB Times report: "Just as the 2013 hurricane season is about to begin, one of the U.S.' main weather satellites failed this week. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, also known as GOES-13, reportedly ceased to operate as of Tuesday, making it impossible to predict weather patterns on the East Coast."
A note at NOAA's page for the GOES family of satellites says "GOES-13 imaging and sounding operations suspended. Recovery efforts for GOES-13 continue and the spacecraft health and safety are nominal. GOES-14 is being activated." You can follow the progress on the agency's page of General Satellite Messages.
Why not get weather data from military satellites? With better resolution and guaranteed performance, military satellite data ought to be able to help us through this crisis. Fudge and jitter the data, shake out any tactical value, but don't blind us to the next hurricane.
Actually, we've seen hints of this for a bit, so it's not a tremendous shock, but it is quite possible that some of the farther-reaching instruments might get cancelled in order to have an early launch.
"OK, we choose to cut weather forecasting for the northeast, rather than ... that $200 million supercomputer to beat out the EU (despite the EU supercomputer being less than half as powerful as our current system while still being more accurate)."
That's odd. Cliff Mass, a well-respected climatologist at University of Washington, expressed concern about deficiencies in the NWS computing resources here and here. He was very positive on the NWS computer upgrades.
But, I guess that you know more about this than he does, right?