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Posted (edited)

Here's the same author published on his local news channel's site

https://www.local10.com/weather/hurricane/2025/06/26/critical-hurricane-forecast-tool-abruptly-terminated/

The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program and its constellation of three weather satellites provide roughly half of all microwave satellite scans to forecasters. Those go dark beginning next Monday.

“Their loss is a big deal,” says retired National Hurricane Center branch chief James Franklin, who oversaw all NHC hurricane forecasters until his retirement in 2017. “Without this imagery, there will be increased risk of a ‘sunrise surprise,’ the realization from first-light images that a system had become much better organized overnight, but it wasn’t recognized because structural details are so hard to discern from [infrared satellite].”

Microwave data are also used to help “fix” or position the center of storms, a task not always easily or accurately accomplished using visible or enhanced satellite pictures. As the butterfly effect demonstrates, small errors in the initial positioning of a storm can lead to outsized forecast errors in four or five days.

“For weaker systems, [it’s] increased initial position error (in the tens of miles) that will cascade into poorer track forecasts,” warns Franklin.

Microwave data such as those from the DoD Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder are essential to hurricane forecasts, not a nice-to-have. They’re used in a variety of critical applications, including estimating hurricane intensity through AI-driven neural networks like the Deep Multispectral INtensity of TCs estimator or DMINT. In the absence of hurricane hunters, DMINT has been shown to be one of the most crucial tools in a hurricane forecaster’s arsenal for estimating storm intensity, largely because of the microwave data it utilizes.

Though other microwave data will still be available to forecasters, the DoD weather satellites comprise half of all microwave instruments, which means data availability will be sliced in half, greatly increasing the odds of missing rapid intensification episodes, underestimating intensity, or misplacing the storm and degrading forecast accuracy.

While the Department of Defense did successfully launched another weather satellite known as the Weather System Follow-on Microwave (WSF-M) in April 2024, that data isn’t currently available to forecasters and it’s not clear if or when data access will be permitted.

It's gonna be a real fuckin scary hurricane season flying blind. Thank goodness the president has a sterling history with disaster recovery and response.

Edited by Captainant
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Posted

Does God have a sense of humor? I’m not sure if He or She has a sense of humor.

Because it is looking far more likely that a giant hurricane is going to switch tracks right after sunset and level Mar-a-Lago.

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Posted

What possible reason could there be for this kind of decision? Is there a huge cost savings, or is the release of this weather data to forecasters some kind of national security risk?

Or is the real reason some bullshit like "weather forecasting is WOKE and we won't allow data to be collected that might further demonstrate anthropogenic climate change"?

Posted
On 6/26/2025 at 4:52 PM, Paper_jam said:

Or is the real reason some bullshit like "weather forecasting is WOKE and we won't allow data to be collected that might further demonstrate anthropogenic climate change"?

They want to shut down any and all major weather forecasts that might even look like it could be used by those talking about climate change, and they also want to privatize weather data and sell the infrastructure off, so that if you're Farmer Bill in Nebraska wanting to track the weather for saying harvesting crops, he will be ponying up a monthly subscription.  There will be the low-tier forecast, which is a very basic forecast, then he can pay for add-ons like tornado warnings, precipitation tracking, wind data, humidity data, etc.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Posted
17 minutes ago, Rip76 said:

IMG_9728.jpeg

Directionally, that's great, but comparing this to 2024 paints a limited picture given the last couple of year SSTs were pretty much off-the-charts high compared to historical data.  Hopefully, it translates to fewer and less intense hurricanes this season, though.

tropATLsst.png

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Posted
35 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

Did the run take it below - or through - Southern Louisiana?    

I don't know.  I'll find out.

Posted
13 hours ago, Rip76 said:

I don't know.  I'll find out.

Southern, it's zonal flow from eastern side of Florida all the way across the gulf.  Bermuda High pressure pushing it west. 

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Posted
4 hours ago, Mother mopar said:

Southern, it's zonal flow from eastern side of Florida all the way across the gulf.  Bermuda High pressure pushing it west. 

IMG_4933.gif.4d5082f468974effd1bb7515b7271368.gif

Jk. Thanks for posting.  But I’m still not sure whether you meant it was going south of Louisiana and hooking north into Texas - or heading west through Southern Louisiana.

Cruising west just off the Louisiana coast would be terrible for us, with the counter clockwise motion causing storm surge (and the dirty side wind) all along the coast.  doing this 30 miles inland would be even worse.

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Posted
20 hours ago, Gatorubet said:

Cruising west just off the Louisiana coast would be terrible for us, with the counter clockwise motion causing storm surge (and the dirty side wind) all along the coast.  doing this 30 miles inland would be even worse.

Some people just can't be satisfied.

Posted
8 hours ago, Blotto said:

I dont know that I can recall a hurricane that took that particular path. 

 

8 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

can't build up strength on that path. hope it holds true 

Yup, if that is the path it won't be a hurricane. 

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Posted

A 10” rainfall event could be a problem for us without the hurricane strength winds. 

I agree that the storm needs to be well south of land to be able to develop into a TS or a hurricane. Duh and all.  

I just hope if it intensifies it does it during the day when we can see it. 

Posted (edited)

if anyone wants an update on forecasting satellites (edit - from a Miami tv hurricane specialist)

 

Edited by Chopper
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Posted
On 7/30/2025 at 1:35 PM, Rip76 said:

Update: NASA is being ordered to DESTROY two perfectly functional weather satellites 

https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/white-house-orders-nasa-deliberately-35680658

Quote

Should NASA choose to comply with the directive, the standalone satellite will burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. The mission has since been dubbed Phase F, per David Crisp, a longtime NASA scientist who designed the instruments and managed the missions until he retired in 2022.

"What I have heard is direct communications from people who were making those plans, who weren't allowed to tell me that that's what they were told to do," Crisp said to NPR. "But they were allowed to ask me questions."

"They were asking me very sharp questions. The only thing that would have motivated those questions was [that] somebody told them to come up with a termination plan," he added. According to Crisp, it makes no sense why Trump would order the termination of the satellites.

Crisp commented that it makes "no economic sense to terminate NASA missions that are returning incredibly valuable data." According to the expert, maintaining the two observatories only costs $15 million per year, barely a dent in the agency's $25.4 billion budget.

Two other NASA scientists have confirmed that the Trump administration had contacted mission leaders to make plans for the termination of other projects that would lose funding under Trump's proposed budget for the next fiscal year.

We will simply ignore the dangerous weather. When's the last time a bunch of kids died in a preventable tragedy but for a few minutes of warning, anyways??

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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Captainant said:

Update: NASA is being ordered to DESTROY two perfectly functional weather satellites 

https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/white-house-orders-nasa-deliberately-35680658

We will simply ignore the dangerous weather. When's the last time a bunch of kids died in a preventable tragedy but for a few minutes of warning, anyways??

Why not spend some money to fix the security issue? Those satellites have storm assessment capabilities other satellites lack. Seems like code ought be cheaper than new hardware.

Edited by Willfully Horn
Posted
8 minutes ago, Willfully Horn said:

Why not spend some money to fix the security issue? Those satellites have storm assessment capabilities other satellites lack. Seems like code ought be cheaper .than new hardware.

Long article about this, but these seem to be some of the key passages:
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5453731/nasa-carbon-dioxide-satellite-mission-threatened

The data the two missions collect is widely used, including by scientists, oil and gas companies and farmers who need detailed information about carbon dioxide and crop health. They are the only two federal satellite missions that were designed and built specifically to monitor planet-warming greenhouse gases.

It is unclear why the Trump administration seeks to end the missions [No, it's not]. The equipment in space is state of the art and is expected to function for many more years, according to scientists who worked on the missions. An official review by NASA in 2023 found that "the data are of exceptionally high quality" and recommended continuing the mission for at least three years.

Both missions, known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, measure carbon dioxide and plant growth around the globe. They use identical measurement devices, but one device is attached to a stand-alone satellite while the other is attached to the International Space Station. The standalone satellite would burn up in the atmosphere if NASA pursued plans to terminate the mission.

*****

Three other academic scientists who use data from the missions confirmed that they, too, have been contacted with questions related to mission termination. All three asked for anonymity because they are concerned that speaking about the mission termination plans publicly could endanger the jobs of the NASA employees who contacted them.

Two current NASA employees also confirmed that NASA mission leaders were told to make termination plans for projects that would lose funding under President Trump's proposed budget for the next fiscal year, or FY 2026, which begins Oct. 1. The employees asked to remain anonymous, because they were told they would be fired if they revealed the request.

*****

In July, congressional Democrats sent a letter to acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy warning his agency not to terminate missions that Congress has funded, and arguing that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and its director, Russ Vought, are overstepping by directing NASA and other agencies to stop spending money that Congress has already appropriated.

"Congress has the power of the purse, not Trump or Vought," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., one of the authors of the letter and the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in an email to NPR. "Eliminating funds or scaling down the operations of Earth-observing satellites would be catastrophic and would severely impair our ability to forecast, manage, and respond to severe weather and climate disasters. The Trump administration is forcing the proposed cuts in its FY26 budget request on already appropriated FY25 funds. This is illegal."

*****

The missions are called Orbiting Carbon Observatories because they were originally designed to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But soon after they launched, scientists realized that they were also accidentally measuring plant growth on Earth.

Basically, when plants are growing, photosynthesis is happening in their cells. And that photosynthesis gives off a very specific wavelength of light. The OCO instruments in space measure that light all over the planet.

"NASA and others have turned this happy accident into an incredibly valuable set of maps of plant photosynthesis around the world," explains Scott Denning, a longtime climate scientist at Colorado State University who worked on the OCO missions and is now retired. "Lo and behold, we also get these lovely, high resolution maps of plant growth," he says. "And that's useful to farmers, useful to rangeland and grazing and drought monitoring and forest mapping and all kinds of things, in addition to the CO2 measurements."

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Posted
21 minutes ago, bolverk said:

And that's useful to farmers, useful to rangeland and grazing and drought monitoring and forest mapping and all kinds of things, in addition to the CO2 measurements."

That last bit? Yeah we don't believe in measurements or empirical science anymore. It's all whatever people believe, because facts are just so partisan these days

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Posted
1 hour ago, Willfully Horn said:

Why not spend some money to fix the security issue? Those satellites have storm assessment capabilities other satellites lack. Seems like code ought be cheaper than new hardware.

BECAUSE WEATHER IS WOKE

Posted
On 8/3/2025 at 9:52 PM, Thetexashammer said:

Countries succeed when old men plant trees under whose shade they will never rest, not when old people suck every last drop of life for their short term benefit.

Motivating Native American GIF

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