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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.
Unfortunately, because of Republican intransigence in Congress, they haven't been able to build and launch a new bird.
Everyone will now be screaming blue murder because of the huge negative economic impact this is going to have. Reliable weather prediction is critical for many businesses, including the ones responsible for the food supply.
I hope the wingnuts are happy.
in the USA weather moves west to east
most times rain in denver or elsewhere in the midwest means rain in NYC 2-3 days later
i also like to which western baseball games were rained out. back when Coors Field was snowed in and the Mets-Rockies games were postponed, NYC got the rain a few days later. same with the other cities west of us
...GOES to sleep.
In the meantime, they'll just give each weatherman a D20 and a roll-sheet and tell them to predict that way.
Try the source at http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/05/22/weather-satellite-fails/2351927/
Satellite logs are at http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/SATS/messages.html, it looks like the satellite failed to return imaging two days ago and is now being put into a storage mode.
The way it's been this year, you'd think GOES-13 failed a long time ago.
If the weather satellite fails, we can just get our weather from the Internet like everybody else.
GOES-14 will be on station shortly, GOES-15 is currently in "full disk mode" eg, getting the whole disk of Earth, instead of being zoomed in on the Western US.. Sure, not as much detail as we'd like, but its not like we're totally blind... BUT, now we need to get another bird up... we're running out of redundancy.
They will need more than just a D20. Give them a bag with a D20, some percentiles, and 3 D6 dice, some roll-sheet and some other tables to which to add the random noise to. Granted it will cost a bit more but would provide much more useful information and probably similar to quality to what we currently have. That gives me an idea for a website called D20weather.com although I probably wouldn't get around to doing anything with it as I have too many projects already so if someone else wants to take a run at it.
Time to offend someone
Just send the shuttle up to fix it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The satellite blog at University of Wisconsin has more information including some images from GOES 14, now turned on.
Hmm, just reread the article. The earliest instance is 'impossible' the next mention is "next to impossible." Poor editing, and inaccurate to boot.
in the USA weather moves west to east
Except when it doesn't and goes west off Africa and comes in from the southeast and slams across Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, South/North Carolina, Virgina, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, etc.. Or when it comes in from the North Atlantic from the northeast....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
A big satellite image of a rotating storm system in the atlantic at least shows that SOMETHING is gonna happen.
Your typical monster hurricane track starts off the west coast of Africa. It moves WEST in the tropics, then heads NORTH along the eastern US, often continuing some westward motion even well north of the tropics. It does eventually head east, but usually not until the damage is done. Think of it as a big C curve that is mostly over the Atlantic and/or Gulf of Mexico. If we're lucky, the left side of the C doesn't intersect land.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I feel like the article is a bit more doomsday than it should be. "impossible to predict weather patterns"? Hardly. Goes 14 is already active as of today according to the NOAA CLASS database and covers a good portion of the area GOES 13 covered even before they move it to a new spot. Also don't forget the polar orbiters (POES) satellites that will cover the same area several times a day with equally, or more in the case of Suomi NPP, advanced instruments. Plus the European satellites contribute to forecasts. So it's hardly like a hurricane will form without us knowing...
That's not very fair. They were able to predict 9 of the last 3 storms!
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Hello? Louisiana.....
Did we just suddenly fall off the fuckin' hurricane map?!? WhooHoo...I certainly hope so!!! That way, I can get rid of that damned flood insurance, and not have to leave town a couple times each summer...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Were you even alive before weather satellites? I remember what it was like 40 years ago, and the accuracy of prediction is now far superior to what it used to be.
The prediction of storm tracks in particular has gotten to be really good. For example the Sandy track prediction was excellent despite the complexity of the situation.
Based on how poor the weather reports along the East Coast have been for the last few months, the satellite must have gone down much earlier.
Case in point, the weather for New York on 5/20, after looking at several different sources the day before, all said the same thing: low 70s with partly cloudy skies. The result: cloud blocked skies and light rain.
If you can't get the report right 12 hours before something happens, why should we listen to you for something a few days down the road?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Meteorologists cannot predict the weather very well WITH the satellite in orbit. So now, all of a sudden, with no satellite, they are going to predict the weather even more poorly?
Perhaps they should invest in a weather rock instead.
What will they do? They might try to do what was done up until about 30 or so years ago before GOES. Presently, it appears to be just a lot more data with about the same time frame when it comes to predictability. (Would Katrina have been any different without its use?)
Then again, since IANAM[eterologist], the idea may be full of hot air.
Yesterday's Weirdness is Tomorrow's Reason Why
This March, these meteorologists predicted 1 foot of snow or more throughout the DC area overnight. When I woke up, there was 3 inches of snow on the ground. If that is considered superior, then the Borg would probably refuse to assimilate you because it would be a step backwards.
sudo make me a sandwich
the most accurate weather report comes from 1) look outside your window and 2) open the door.
This same satelite, GOES-13, already failed (according to reports from September 2012)- http://news.yahoo.com/key-us-east-coast-weather-satellite-goes-13-141636708.html
Maybe it was fixed, but—at least according to the above referenced article—GOES-14 took over as the main satelite for the East Coast since 2012.
Meteorologists cannot predict the weather very well WITH the satellite in orbit. So now, all of a sudden, with no satellite, they are going to predict the weather even more poorly?
Perhaps they should invest in a weather rock instead.
Hmmm, well maybe in addition to the satellites for accuracy verification. I mean, they're relatively cheap, and Weather rocks ARE never wrong...
Hang on. Are you asserting that "one foot of snow predicted; three inches of snow in reality" is the worst possible prediction? So if they had predicted two feet of snow or a sunny 90 deg. F those would have both been better predictions? What metric are you using here?
Note that "superior" does not mean "the best possible", it just means "better". Either you know (but didn't bother to mention) that 40 years ago weather prediction was so significantly more precise that your single anecdote is sufficient to illustrate that fact or you believe (as I have asserted in the first paragraph) that the prediction in your anecdote was literally the worst possible weather prediction imaginable, which would make it very likely that predictions were more accurate 40 years ago. Neither position makes a lot of sense.
For the sake of my amusement I shall assume that you indeed consider the prediction to be the worst possible because of your irrational hatred of things that are one foot long.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Yeah, and I remember getting 6 inches of "flurries" one Thanksgiving.
Of course, you neglect the other 364 days of the year when they were spot on.
Did we just suddenly fall off the fuckin' hurricane map?!?
Sorry, didn't realize you were still around after that last hurricane.
Sorry you didn't get as much snow as forecast. You can ask for a refund. On the bright side satellites do help predict the landfall of hurricanes, which can save thousands of lives. For examples of how bad things can get when they can't predict landfall, see the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the 1938 New England hurricane (aka the Long Island Express).
Most forecasting is done by meteorologists viewing the predicted conditions based on a numerical model that normally gets run every 12 hours. The model's forecast is usually pretty good out to 72 hours or so. What happens is that an experienced weather-guesser (ex-Navy, here) will look at the model's output (which lags realtime to some degree) and compare the prediction to the actual conditions for the timeframe in question. If the correlation is high, he/she will put more faith into the model's longer term predictions. If the model isn't tracking reality very well, the forecaster will rely on experience rather than the numerical prediction for the longer-range forecast.
Sounder data from the available weather satellites is used to seed the modelling software as close to its run time as possible, to set up starting conditions for the observable areas. If that data is lacking, the previous model run data closest to the time of the new run is used. (GIGO applies...)
The realtime data can also come from radiosondes, official observations stations, buoys, or what have you. Losing a bird doesn't mean the forecasting infrastructure will fall apart; it just means that imagery will come from a different source (= different angle, with attendant distortion), and some loss of realtime input for the model run.
The predictions of the type of weather and the tracks has gotten much better but the predictions of the magnitude haven't. Seems that we've put more effort into figuring out where weather systems are going to go.
Please tell me that GOES-R will be sporting some sort of ghostbusters reference...
Please help metamoderate.
I forced refresh my WeatherBug so many times earlier this week. I'm in NYC, and I was dumb founded at how bad the weather reports/predictions were. At one point, I'm standing in the park, it's about 70 degrees, and weather bug says in an hour it's going to be 84 degrees. And hour later it was 71. It stayed under 75 the whole day.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Can't think of any reason a spy satellite would be designed to have such a wide field of view...or even be in a geostationary orbit. They need to look at human infrastructure, not whole oceans and continents.
I keep hearing how there's all this free money from the gov't. Show me where to get it. I got a buddy that fell on hard times. He found out real fast it's not there. Turns out it's damn hard to get all that free gov't cheese if you're not bribing a congressman. Most states fight tooth and nail to stop you from getting health care, housing and food, let alone cash.
But go ahead. Keep on believing there's this magical gov't safety net waiting there if you stumble. And if you ever do trip up, have fun finding out there's no net to catch you...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Knowing the weather of tomorrow already is a great advantage. Especially if that weather might include a hurricane.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yes. I remember when TIROS was launched, and in the years following other earth-observing sats. Much more data coming in, better prediction models, the nine yards of it. Back when, the weather presenter on the local (more channels if in or near a large city) was a real meteorologist and worked his or her reports and forecasts using methods developed or improved largely due to needs during World War Two. Most were pretty good, given what they worked with. Going more than two, maybe three days out was not really possible except for using historic patterns at much lower probability.
Nowadays? It might have been unusual, but about ten years back I visited with friends for two weeks a few states over and packed according to long-range forecast. Biggest anomaly was an afternoon's forecast rain didn't happen.
We must borrow more trillions of monies from China to invade another country. It's the only way we can prevent losses like this and crumbling infrastructure like the bridge collapse in Washington.
It's the only way.
Lichtenstein must pay.
Sweden will suffer for its smoked herring embargo of New Jersey.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...