Our current series of geostationary weather satellites operated by NOAA have been taking images at 1 km resolution for the visible band and 4 km for four IR bands since 1995. The primary difference with Elektro is that it has more bands, two visible bands at 1 km and 8 IR bands at 4 km (which is why it looks blocky when you zoom in). A description of that imager can be found here:
http://database.eohandbook.com/database/instrumentsummary.aspx?instrumentID=784
The image referenced in the article is a false color composite, which has been a common product from weather satellites (geostationary and otherwise) since we started using them decades ago. It shows vegetation more than we have seen from GOES because it has a near-IR band. GOES typically takes "full disk" images every three hours.
The US has a new platform going up in 2016 with 16 bands - visible bands are 0.5 km and IR are at 1 km. That sensor will not be able to do true color (some of us fought hard for that...) but it can be simulated to an extent (the sensor will have red and blue wavelength sensing abilities, with a near-IR band allowing use of a look-up table to generate green; the surface under thin clouds, around coastal areas, and some other cases don't look quite right). Japan has bought the same sensor from the same vendor but swapped out a band and replaced it with green, so they will have true color images at roughly 22,000x22,000 pixels in the 2014-2015 time frame. This new sensor can take "full disk" images every 15 minutes (that is the scan schedule set for the US, it could go faster than that).
The US took true color images from a geostationary camera on ATS-3 in the late 1960s. As far as I know no one has taken true color images from the geostationary orbit since.
I haven't looked closely at Elektro data but the loop I've seen indicates light leaking into the telescope as the sun starts to light the Earth in the east (ie sunrise) - it looks like a lens flare. Many weather satellites have issues like this to some extent, but in this case it was more pronounced than I've usually seen it.
The published exit poll data is "corrected" based on the actual results. And yes, doing that does defeat the purpose, it would seem. There is raw exit poll data that is not publicly available.
GlovePIE lets you remap WiiMote controls to standard inputs. That worked great, the bigger issue for me was the bluetooth driver. I had to revert to the Microsoft one to make it work, the Dell-approved driver from Broadcom wasn't working for me.
QuikSCAT is for profiling a storm, which does improve the forecast. Every mile of coastline that has to be evacuated costs us around $1,000,000 (maybe more these days), and a 16% decrease in track forecast accuracy has a real monetary impact.
Predicting the number of storms in a season is tricky business. Last year El Nino fired up, which created a situation that suppressed hurricanes. Otherwise the conditions were very good for hurricane development. That hasn't really changed, so this year could see many storms since the El Nino has weakened. But it is possible it will just be an average year.
NOAA's and NASA's earth observing satellite fleets are aging, and replacements are either not in the queue or 8+ years away. Our radar satellites like QuikSCAT and microwave-sensing satellites, both of which are critical for tropical weather monitoring, are past their useful lifetimes with no replacements on deck. This is a problem. One could argue that the problem is funding, and to some degree it is, but another part of the problem is management and a lack of useful oversight by Congress. We are going to lose some of our weather and climate monitoring abilities because we launched a number of research satellites that we came to rely on and then did not make any plans to replace them.
NOAAPort was built because of users like the Navy and Air Force. It will take tremendous pressure and resources to convince them to change a system that they feel is reliable. Other than ftping files from a server there is no other reliable (by their definition) way to get the forecast data, and ftp does no good to a carrier battle group in the Indian Ocean.
Yes, and there was also discussion of trying to buy up stock in Vivendi/Universal (who was ultimately responsible for the cancellation, it appeared). But to have an impact, a real impact, it would have taken a tremendous outlay, well beyond what a few thousand people could muster.
Planned obsolescence isn't really the problem with satellites. The environment of space is. The fact that the cameras can be upgraded is very good and has saved a lot of money, but other parts, like the mirror, cannot be replaced. Over time the mirror's performance drops, and short of bringing the satellite to Earth, refurbishing it, and relaunching it there is no to fix that problem. The cost of such a mission would be huge because we have no vehicle that could bring the Hubble back to the ground.
If and when launch costs and capacity make the economics more appealing, the satellite buses will be reused rather than discarded. Until then it is always cheaper to deorbit than refurbish once a certain point has been reached. I don't know if Hubble is there yet, but it certainly has age related issues.
Johns-Hopkins has already proposed a Hubble-like follow-on: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.ht ml?pid=16050
It would use the camera that was destined for Hubble and basically update the design. And hopefully have a mirror that has the right focal point...
It would cost around $1 billion to build and launch.
Upgradable designs do save us money in the long run since the basic physics - namely optics - do not change. As long as the mirrors are clean, all is good. The cameras are replacable, and they are relatively cheap, certainly cheaper than an entire new satellite.
I could find out for certain, but I believe somewhere between 2 and 6 Dell rack mounted workstations (P3 Xeons or something to that effect) do the processing of the radar data and then it all goes into whatever NOAA's webserver system is. Operational NOAA products (especially the newer ones; some older products are not so good) generally must require a minimum of oversight. I know because I designed and coded one.
I concur that dissemination has not been a priority for the government. But the graphical products you want private industry to create are the responsibility of a different group than the dissemination. The people who need to be motivated to improve the dissemination are mid and high level managers. The graphical products are approved by them because they are cheap and easy ways to provide the data and improve the public perception of NOAA and the NWS. Dissemination of raw data costs more and isn't as sexy. If you want it to change, talk to your congressman. It appears you work in the private weather industry, so I presume he or she would listen to you for that reason if nothing else.
And exactly why should the gov't be in the business of creating high-quality images of storm relative velocity? Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that a free-market would be in a better position to provide?
I think that the correct question is: Does the weather prediction and data dissemination industry take upon itself the liability associated with weather forecasts?
The answer is no, they don't and they never will. The free-market is not applicable to a field where ALL of the significant costs and risks are born by the Federal government. The challenges associated with downloading and ingesting data are inconsequential compared to maintaining the Nexrad and satellite systems and launching soundings twice a day from ever weather station. Private industry is incapable of providing that more cheaply than the government does.
And the same goes for graphics. The government has the data in house and the expertise regarding the data in its research centers. Making a pretty picture from raw NWS data is not nearly as difficult as you have been making it sound, nor are the computational requirements particularly high. Furthermore, there are plenty of tools (many of which came out of publicly-funded research projects) out there that reduce the development time for someone already working in the field to a few hours rather than the weeks you cite. Sure, someone who is a good programmer but isn't familiar with the science will take longer. Why should the public pay for that when the expertise is in house? The NOAA pages in question are not made by the forecasters, they are built by researchers and NOAA contractors to serve requests of forecasters and the public.
I work in satellite meteorology and I am quite familiar with what private industry considers to be a value-added product. A lot of it is cool looking, but I have never seen an example where private industry was actually creating something *new*. The reason is two-fold: collecting data to make something new, to create new knowledge, costs a lot of $$$ and there is risk involved with providing what amounts to an experimental product.
Slashdot Mirror
Our current series of geostationary weather satellites operated by NOAA have been taking images at 1 km resolution for the visible band and 4 km for four IR bands since 1995. The primary difference with Elektro is that it has more bands, two visible bands at 1 km and 8 IR bands at 4 km (which is why it looks blocky when you zoom in). A description of that imager can be found here: http://database.eohandbook.com/database/instrumentsummary.aspx?instrumentID=784 The image referenced in the article is a false color composite, which has been a common product from weather satellites (geostationary and otherwise) since we started using them decades ago. It shows vegetation more than we have seen from GOES because it has a near-IR band. GOES typically takes "full disk" images every three hours. The US has a new platform going up in 2016 with 16 bands - visible bands are 0.5 km and IR are at 1 km. That sensor will not be able to do true color (some of us fought hard for that...) but it can be simulated to an extent (the sensor will have red and blue wavelength sensing abilities, with a near-IR band allowing use of a look-up table to generate green; the surface under thin clouds, around coastal areas, and some other cases don't look quite right). Japan has bought the same sensor from the same vendor but swapped out a band and replaced it with green, so they will have true color images at roughly 22,000x22,000 pixels in the 2014-2015 time frame. This new sensor can take "full disk" images every 15 minutes (that is the scan schedule set for the US, it could go faster than that). The US took true color images from a geostationary camera on ATS-3 in the late 1960s. As far as I know no one has taken true color images from the geostationary orbit since. I haven't looked closely at Elektro data but the loop I've seen indicates light leaking into the telescope as the sun starts to light the Earth in the east (ie sunrise) - it looks like a lens flare. Many weather satellites have issues like this to some extent, but in this case it was more pronounced than I've usually seen it.
The published exit poll data is "corrected" based on the actual results. And yes, doing that does defeat the purpose, it would seem. There is raw exit poll data that is not publicly available.
GlovePIE lets you remap WiiMote controls to standard inputs. That worked great, the bigger issue for me was the bluetooth driver. I had to revert to the Microsoft one to make it work, the Dell-approved driver from Broadcom wasn't working for me.
QuikSCAT is for profiling a storm, which does improve the forecast. Every mile of coastline that has to be evacuated costs us around $1,000,000 (maybe more these days), and a 16% decrease in track forecast accuracy has a real monetary impact.
Predicting the number of storms in a season is tricky business. Last year El Nino fired up, which created a situation that suppressed hurricanes. Otherwise the conditions were very good for hurricane development. That hasn't really changed, so this year could see many storms since the El Nino has weakened. But it is possible it will just be an average year.
NOAA's and NASA's earth observing satellite fleets are aging, and replacements are either not in the queue or 8+ years away. Our radar satellites like QuikSCAT and microwave-sensing satellites, both of which are critical for tropical weather monitoring, are past their useful lifetimes with no replacements on deck. This is a problem. One could argue that the problem is funding, and to some degree it is, but another part of the problem is management and a lack of useful oversight by Congress. We are going to lose some of our weather and climate monitoring abilities because we launched a number of research satellites that we came to rely on and then did not make any plans to replace them.
NOAAPort was built because of users like the Navy and Air Force. It will take tremendous pressure and resources to convince them to change a system that they feel is reliable. Other than ftping files from a server there is no other reliable (by their definition) way to get the forecast data, and ftp does no good to a carrier battle group in the Indian Ocean.
Area 51 looks a lot like NIR reflection off of a salt flat or sand saturating a sensor. There's another flat to the south-southwest of the AFB.
Yes, and there was also discussion of trying to buy up stock in Vivendi/Universal (who was ultimately responsible for the cancellation, it appeared). But to have an impact, a real impact, it would have taken a tremendous outlay, well beyond what a few thousand people could muster.
Planned obsolescence isn't really the problem with satellites. The environment of space is. The fact that the cameras can be upgraded is very good and has saved a lot of money, but other parts, like the mirror, cannot be replaced. Over time the mirror's performance drops, and short of bringing the satellite to Earth, refurbishing it, and relaunching it there is no to fix that problem. The cost of such a mission would be huge because we have no vehicle that could bring the Hubble back to the ground.
If and when launch costs and capacity make the economics more appealing, the satellite buses will be reused rather than discarded. Until then it is always cheaper to deorbit than refurbish once a certain point has been reached. I don't know if Hubble is there yet, but it certainly has age related issues.
Johns-Hopkins has already proposed a Hubble-like follow-on:t ml?pid=16050
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.h
It would use the camera that was destined for Hubble and basically update the design. And hopefully have a mirror that has the right focal point...
It would cost around $1 billion to build and launch.
Upgradable designs do save us money in the long run since the basic physics - namely optics - do not change. As long as the mirrors are clean, all is good. The cameras are replacable, and they are relatively cheap, certainly cheaper than an entire new satellite.
I could find out for certain, but I believe somewhere between 2 and 6 Dell rack mounted workstations (P3 Xeons or something to that effect) do the processing of the radar data and then it all goes into whatever NOAA's webserver system is. Operational NOAA products (especially the newer ones; some older products are not so good) generally must require a minimum of oversight. I know because I designed and coded one.
I concur that dissemination has not been a priority for the government. But the graphical products you want private industry to create are the responsibility of a different group than the dissemination. The people who need to be motivated to improve the dissemination are mid and high level managers. The graphical products are approved by them because they are cheap and easy ways to provide the data and improve the public perception of NOAA and the NWS. Dissemination of raw data costs more and isn't as sexy. If you want it to change, talk to your congressman. It appears you work in the private weather industry, so I presume he or she would listen to you for that reason if nothing else.
And exactly why should the gov't be in the business of creating high-quality images of storm relative velocity? Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that a free-market would be in a better position to provide?
I think that the correct question is: Does the weather prediction and data dissemination industry take upon itself the liability associated with weather forecasts?
The answer is no, they don't and they never will. The free-market is not applicable to a field where ALL of the significant costs and risks are born by the Federal government. The challenges associated with downloading and ingesting data are inconsequential compared to maintaining the Nexrad and satellite systems and launching soundings twice a day from ever weather station. Private industry is incapable of providing that more cheaply than the government does.
And the same goes for graphics. The government has the data in house and the expertise regarding the data in its research centers. Making a pretty picture from raw NWS data is not nearly as difficult as you have been making it sound, nor are the computational requirements particularly high. Furthermore, there are plenty of tools (many of which came out of publicly-funded research projects) out there that reduce the development time for someone already working in the field to a few hours rather than the weeks you cite. Sure, someone who is a good programmer but isn't familiar with the science will take longer. Why should the public pay for that when the expertise is in house? The NOAA pages in question are not made by the forecasters, they are built by researchers and NOAA contractors to serve requests of forecasters and the public.
I work in satellite meteorology and I am quite familiar with what private industry considers to be a value-added product. A lot of it is cool looking, but I have never seen an example where private industry was actually creating something *new*. The reason is two-fold: collecting data to make something new, to create new knowledge, costs a lot of $$$ and there is risk involved with providing what amounts to an experimental product.