“Researchers say the satellites themselves are operating normally and do not appear to have suffered any errors that would physically prevent the data from continuing to be collected and distributed, so the abrupt data halt might have been an intentional decision.”
Wait, the U.S. aren’t even going to try selling the satellites? We’re just scrapping them?
The intent is to disable the capability to ignore the data. If you allow access to someone else, you're not preventing the data capture and dissemination. If the data shows hurricanes are intensifying in strength due to climate change, and you no longer capture the data, you can say with a straight face "No it isn't and you can't prove it."
How large systems with exposure to these places (insurance, capital markets) respond is what you should look to next. What do you do when you don't have the data to accurately price risk?
I think it’s even more nefarious than that. They can attack other countries that claim intensifying climate and weather scenarios by saying their data is biased while claiming to have the best data in the world but not share for national security reasons. While this may seem like something unbelievable to you or me it is easily eaten up by their supporters who love propaganda. Like, my republican parents are convinced robotaxi is amaxing after the unreasonably bad debut in Austin. They simply didn’t hear or want to hear that Tesla would not produce a working product.
To what end? What is the benefit of shutting down and ignoring data when for the last decade and a half even with data didn’t matter? I didn’t matter before why would it now?
> What do you do when you don't have the data to accurately price risk?
Insurance companies will just be sending up their own satellites, and that is the true goal. Force people to pay money to private entities for a service that used to be provided by the government for free.
Functionally, in such a system there is no difference between that and regular taxes, just in a private system there's opportunities for those in power (because you gotta have a lot of money to send up a powerful satellite) to make even more money.
With the current US administration, always look at the grifting opportunities, that will explain virtually all policy decisions.
It feels like the title here isn't accurate - we haven't lost the satellite at all. It wasn't destroyed, it wasn't de-orbited (on purpose or accidentally), it wasn't hacked or hijacked.
Can we ask dang to change the title to something like "Blocking of key US satellite data could...."?
Are you maybe skipping over the word "data" in the headline? The headline doesn't imply the satellite itself is lost, just the data coming from the satellite.
Well there's your problem. They were tracking the arctic! That means they were bad satellites that hurt people. They contradict the government's idea that climate science doesn't exist
There is one operating satellite in this constellation, and congress voted to shut down the program in 2015.
The DMSP program was discontinued in 2015 by a vote in congress[1]. Virtually every working stallelite in this program has failed. As best as I can tell there's just a single working one specifically NOAA-19[2].
Instead the program has switched to JPSS[3] which is part of GEOSS[4].
- DMSP satellites are up and measuring data
- These data will continue to be measured after Monday
- the government is discontinuing processing and public access to the data
- This will impact our capacity to predict hurricanes and monitor sea ice.
While you're correct that Congress voted to phase out the program, you're wrong on a number of levels. First, NOAA-19 is not a DMSP satellite. Second, many of the DMSP satellites are still in orbit and functioning - even the very Wikipedia article you linked to shows this. There was no legitimate reason to cut off their data that we've been given. Third, JPSS and GEOS lack some of the capabilities of the DMSP, for example the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder that was still providing highly valuable real-time microwave data, including precipitation rates, sea surface wind speeds, sea ice coverage, water vapor levels and cloud properties.
So to be frank, the only thing that's "NOT TRUE" is nearly all of your post.
> 2016 failure of DMSP 19 without replacement[edit]
On 11 February 2016, a power failure left both the command-and-control subsystem and its backup without the ability to reach the satellite's processor, according to the U.S. Air Force Space Command investigation released in July 2016 that also announced that DMSP 5D-3/F19 was considered to be 'lost'. The satellite's data can still be used, until it ceases pointing the sensors towards the Earth. The satellite was the most recent on-orbit, having been launched on 3 April 2014.[15]
> The failure only left F16, F17 and F18 – all significantly past their expected 3–5 year lifespan – operational. F19's planned replacement was not carried out because Congress ordered the destruction of the already constructed F20 probe to save money by not having to pay its storage costs. It is unlikely that a new DMSP satellite would be launched before 2023; by then the three remaining satellites should no longer be operational.[16]
To anyone acting as if this is a surprise or they're suddenly caught out and have to switch to another provider, I have to wonder, with the writing on the wall for 8 years now, how have you not already updated your plans?
That's the guardian for you. Remove context. Generate hyperbole. Beg for money.
> To anyone acting as if this is a surprise or they're suddenly caught out and have to switch to another provider, I have to wonder, with the writing on the wall for 8 years now, how have you not already updated your plans?
That doesn't accurately capture the reason why there's outrage here. In the weather community, we're constantly thinking through contingencies because a great deal of things are out of our control - and we rely on aging infrastructure, much of which is already flaky to begin with.
Data outages and data loss happens. But there's no reason to allow a _preventable_ data loss to occur. The DMSP data is still being collected, it's just not being distributed downstream. And the decision to make this policy change was seemingly done rapidly and with no input or feedback from the user community of this data - both inside and outside the federal government.
There's no reason to turn off the spigot of this data. And there certainly is no reason to do so abruptly and with virtually no notice. As a consequence, the community is limited in its ability to adapt. For instance, it would take time (and money) to spin up more hurricane hunting resources to replace the overpass data that the SSMI/S instrument captures. Some private companies operate PMW satellite constellations and we could accelerate the acquisition of these data, but there are limited (read: none) federal mechanisms to do this and due to vertical integration in the weather industry, the operators of these constellations may not actually be inclined to do so - and certainly won't do so on the cheap, especially for the federal government.
So this isn't hyperbole. This is a really big deal. It might not be visible to you, but there is a panic and scramble occurring in the weather community to figure out what to do from here.
And for the record - yes, the same panic would happen if the DMSP satellites failed suddenly due to natural causes. But this current situation could've - and should've - been prevented.
Ah, so basically if you have a car that's 5 years out of warranty but still runs fine, and the government comes in and takes your keys so you can't drive it, that would be your fault for not having gotten a new car sooner?
“The ATMS sounder that remains is far inferior to hurricane forecasters than the SSMIS instrument the Department of Defense is discontinuing. Unlike the SSMIS which scans at a continuous resolution, the quality of the ATMS degrades considerably on its edges, rendering the sounder useless for most operational hurricane forecasts. The example below shows the difference between the scans from both instruments for Hurricane Erick last Wednesday, June 18th.”
The Trump administration is proposing to end all NOAA climate research (alongside nearly all other NOAA research).
The damage to weather prediction and climate research will go far beyond "decommissioning old sensors." We're talking about an abrupt end to nearly all science related to climate and weather in the US. Even if a future administration decides to turn funding back on, it will take a generation to rebuild the research community.
sort-of yes.. for the last decades, there have been a steady stream of college students who want to make change for the environment (in the West, at least). There have been far more trained and qualified young graduates than there are jobs. Now, we see the latest evolution of this story arc -- not only are the graduates left to fend for themselves by the US Federal Govt and others, but the few jobs that did become available are gone, and those that had stable careers by getting one of the few jobs, are being fired.
There is an embarrassing trend at the US EPA for example, to get interns and volunteers to do some official work, with no real way to transition to full time with job security and health insurance. This is partly due to the unending stream of applicants, despite few positions.
So from this context, rebuilding research means .. what? Both institutional knowledge store and authoritative titled positions. After some advances in data management by Google and some other commercial players, it is not clear what role Federal science had anyway, from this desk.
I was about to say this -- the impact is to deep red states -- Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama.
They all voted for this with extreme skew towards the current policies. What is the point of trying to save this satellite data if the very people most affected dont care for it?
I strongly suspect that said states will still find a way to get federal funds for relief, whether from the president directly (since Trump's stated plan is to replace FEMA with his own discretion) or, in an emergency, through a very quick act from congress. Of course, it's much cheaper to mitigate hurricane damage _before_ it's done so gutting all the planning related services as the Trump administration seems wont to do will only either hurt a lot of people in red states or, more likely, cost the country more than if they'd left NOAA and FEMA alone.
Do you realize how little people in these areas pay attention to these forecasts? Hurricanes until you hit CAT 5 are viewed as bad rain storms that may or may not take the power out for a week. There is little evacuation or prep for the majority of people there as they are consistently prepared. Even still, the real threat of a hurricane isn’t the hurricane itself but the storm surge and all the tornadoes they create. Neither of those can be predicted with any accuracy so please help me understand why pathing is important?
This is such a bad article. They shut down this specific program in 2015, and switched to JPSS instead.
There is no war on anyone, and this has nothing to do with Trump, DOGS, or Climate change. Rather there were too many satellite failures, leaving just a single operating one in orbit.
This is true, however it does provide unending entertainment as seen by the top voted comments wondering how this is a secret war on the courts and Europe - lol
That's not at all how insurance companies price risk.
Unknown risk is more risk, and more risk is more expensive.
Therefore, unknown hurricane data is more risky and thus more expensive.
If you know your car's engine is going to need replaced after exactly 100,000 miles, you know to save up for a new engine or a new car - and you know how long you have to save, so you can precisely set aside an appropriate figure every month.
If you know your car's engine will die sometime within the next 15,000 miles, you know you need to start saving up immediately, but b/c you don't know when in the next 15,000 miles you have to rush your saving.
If you have no idea when your car's engine is going to die, you are likely to end up dead engine and little to no savings.
The rebuilds happen with federal FEMA dollars and there is an entire cottage industry of re-builders who take federal funds, rebuild homes -- and then do it again two years later. https://www.fema.gov/node/what-home-repair-assistance
The problem of important projects surviving political change is a tough one.
A lot of these important projects have a single point of failure - who is the president every four years. I wonder how we build institutions and resources resilient to that?
I realize privatization is an ugly word, but could some of this stuff be provided by the private sector?
Can we make it possible to fund initiatives in a multinational manner where countries contribute to these efforts, but if one country blinks out, then you still have it go along?
> A lot of these important projects have a single point of failure - who is the president every four years. I wonder how we build institutions and resources resilient to that?
We already did. The legislative branch allocates funds for stuff that the people deem worthy. That budget becomes law. The Constitution says the "President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." There's even a specific law that prevents the President from withholding Congressionally-approved funds.
What you are seeing here is not a lack of designed resilience, it's the wilful removal of that system.
If a president can ignore the laws requiring those projects to exist, the president can ignore the laws protecting private companies from being nationalized and shut down.
> who is the president every four years...could some of this stuff be provided by the private sector?
A president cares about election every four years. Private sector cares about it every quarter. I doubt privatization is improvement if you want to focus on long term.
> could some of this stuff be provided by the private sector?
Yes, but the key man problem still exists. For instance, SpaceX could build/operate a network of weather satellites for various nations but the instability of the founder leads to similar issues.
This is likely because the DMSP satellites are outdated:
"In 2015, Congress voted to terminate the DMSP program and to scrap the DMSP 5D-3/F20 satellite, ordering the Air Force to move on to a next-generation system." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Meteorological_Satelli...
Readit News
Wait, the U.S. aren’t even going to try selling the satellites? We’re just scrapping them?
How large systems with exposure to these places (insurance, capital markets) respond is what you should look to next. What do you do when you don't have the data to accurately price risk?
Relevant comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43366311
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42450680
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41664750 (top comment of this thread aggressively relevant)
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Insurance companies will just be sending up their own satellites, and that is the true goal. Force people to pay money to private entities for a service that used to be provided by the government for free.
Functionally, in such a system there is no difference between that and regular taxes, just in a private system there's opportunities for those in power (because you gotta have a lot of money to send up a powerful satellite) to make even more money.
With the current US administration, always look at the grifting opportunities, that will explain virtually all policy decisions.
Deleted Comment
Can we ask dang to change the title to something like "Blocking of key US satellite data could...."?
There is one operating satellite in this constellation, and congress voted to shut down the program in 2015.
The DMSP program was discontinued in 2015 by a vote in congress[1]. Virtually every working stallelite in this program has failed. As best as I can tell there's just a single working one specifically NOAA-19[2].
Instead the program has switched to JPSS[3] which is part of GEOSS[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Meteorological_Satelli... (scroll up slightly)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA-19
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Polar_Satellite_System
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Earth_Observation_Syste...
- DMSP satellites are up and measuring data - These data will continue to be measured after Monday - the government is discontinuing processing and public access to the data - This will impact our capacity to predict hurricanes and monitor sea ice.
Which of the above are “not true”?
So to be frank, the only thing that's "NOT TRUE" is nearly all of your post.
> 2016 failure of DMSP 19 without replacement[edit] On 11 February 2016, a power failure left both the command-and-control subsystem and its backup without the ability to reach the satellite's processor, according to the U.S. Air Force Space Command investigation released in July 2016 that also announced that DMSP 5D-3/F19 was considered to be 'lost'. The satellite's data can still be used, until it ceases pointing the sensors towards the Earth. The satellite was the most recent on-orbit, having been launched on 3 April 2014.[15]
> The failure only left F16, F17 and F18 – all significantly past their expected 3–5 year lifespan – operational. F19's planned replacement was not carried out because Congress ordered the destruction of the already constructed F20 probe to save money by not having to pay its storage costs. It is unlikely that a new DMSP satellite would be launched before 2023; by then the three remaining satellites should no longer be operational.[16]
To anyone acting as if this is a surprise or they're suddenly caught out and have to switch to another provider, I have to wonder, with the writing on the wall for 8 years now, how have you not already updated your plans?
That's the guardian for you. Remove context. Generate hyperbole. Beg for money.
That doesn't accurately capture the reason why there's outrage here. In the weather community, we're constantly thinking through contingencies because a great deal of things are out of our control - and we rely on aging infrastructure, much of which is already flaky to begin with.
Data outages and data loss happens. But there's no reason to allow a _preventable_ data loss to occur. The DMSP data is still being collected, it's just not being distributed downstream. And the decision to make this policy change was seemingly done rapidly and with no input or feedback from the user community of this data - both inside and outside the federal government.
There's no reason to turn off the spigot of this data. And there certainly is no reason to do so abruptly and with virtually no notice. As a consequence, the community is limited in its ability to adapt. For instance, it would take time (and money) to spin up more hurricane hunting resources to replace the overpass data that the SSMI/S instrument captures. Some private companies operate PMW satellite constellations and we could accelerate the acquisition of these data, but there are limited (read: none) federal mechanisms to do this and due to vertical integration in the weather industry, the operators of these constellations may not actually be inclined to do so - and certainly won't do so on the cheap, especially for the federal government.
So this isn't hyperbole. This is a really big deal. It might not be visible to you, but there is a panic and scramble occurring in the weather community to figure out what to do from here.
And for the record - yes, the same panic would happen if the DMSP satellites failed suddenly due to natural causes. But this current situation could've - and should've - been prevented.
Generally, you use space hardware until it dies, which is hopefully well beyond the design life.
Also from NOAA: “Noaa said they would not affect the quality of forecasting.”
Decommissioning old sensors?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-what-pro...
“The ATMS sounder that remains is far inferior to hurricane forecasters than the SSMIS instrument the Department of Defense is discontinuing. Unlike the SSMIS which scans at a continuous resolution, the quality of the ATMS degrades considerably on its edges, rendering the sounder useless for most operational hurricane forecasts. The example below shows the difference between the scans from both instruments for Hurricane Erick last Wednesday, June 18th.”
There is also a useful figure included.
The damage to weather prediction and climate research will go far beyond "decommissioning old sensors." We're talking about an abrupt end to nearly all science related to climate and weather in the US. Even if a future administration decides to turn funding back on, it will take a generation to rebuild the research community.
There is an embarrassing trend at the US EPA for example, to get interns and volunteers to do some official work, with no real way to transition to full time with job security and health insurance. This is partly due to the unending stream of applicants, despite few positions.
So from this context, rebuilding research means .. what? Both institutional knowledge store and authoritative titled positions. After some advances in data management by Google and some other commercial players, it is not clear what role Federal science had anyway, from this desk.
They all voted for this with extreme skew towards the current policies. What is the point of trying to save this satellite data if the very people most affected dont care for it?
Because people still should not suffer... jeez.
The administration of Florida has a war on the idea of climate change:
* "Ron DeSantis signs bill scrubbing ‘climate change’ from Florida state laws": https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/16/desa...
* "Florida Officials Barred from Referencing “Climate Change”: https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/florida-officials-b...
This allows (certain) Florida politicians to put their head in the sand even more than they already have.
There is no war on anyone, and this has nothing to do with Trump, DOGS, or Climate change. Rather there were too many satellite failures, leaving just a single operating one in orbit.
If you know your car's engine is going to need replaced after exactly 100,000 miles, you know to save up for a new engine or a new car - and you know how long you have to save, so you can precisely set aside an appropriate figure every month.
If you know your car's engine will die sometime within the next 15,000 miles, you know you need to start saving up immediately, but b/c you don't know when in the next 15,000 miles you have to rush your saving.
If you have no idea when your car's engine is going to die, you are likely to end up dead engine and little to no savings.
HAFS is often the best
https://www.noaa.gov/news/new-noaa-system-ushers-in-next-gen...
European models assimilate in data from US satellites and vice versa
A lot of these important projects have a single point of failure - who is the president every four years. I wonder how we build institutions and resources resilient to that?
I realize privatization is an ugly word, but could some of this stuff be provided by the private sector?
Can we make it possible to fund initiatives in a multinational manner where countries contribute to these efforts, but if one country blinks out, then you still have it go along?
We already did. The legislative branch allocates funds for stuff that the people deem worthy. That budget becomes law. The Constitution says the "President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." There's even a specific law that prevents the President from withholding Congressionally-approved funds.
What you are seeing here is not a lack of designed resilience, it's the wilful removal of that system.
A president cares about election every four years. Private sector cares about it every quarter. I doubt privatization is improvement if you want to focus on long term.
Yes, but the key man problem still exists. For instance, SpaceX could build/operate a network of weather satellites for various nations but the instability of the founder leads to similar issues.
The GOES-R satellites seem to have equal or better resolution: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atot/4/4/1520-042...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOES-16
DMSP resolves to 600m, while GOES-R resolves to 500m (don't confuse it with the older GOES satellites mentioned in the article).