Only a couple days before it was scheduled to cut off the feed from three Navy weather satellites that provide vital data for forecasting hurricanes, the Pentagon quietly let NOAA meteorologists know Tuesday that it would actually continue making the data available after all. Hooray, and also why the hell were they going to cut off the damn data in the first place? Especially right as we reach the heart of hurricane season. (Who knew we had a season for those?)
As meteorologist and hurricane expert Michael Lowry explains at his newsletter, yes, the satellites were old, but still had a year or two more useful life in ‘em.
Although the three weather satellites are expected to reach the end of their lifespan in the next year or two, the sudden announcement in June that the satellite data streams would be cut early and only weeks before the hurricane season peak caught forecasters flatfooted. The lack of notice sent scientists scrambling to find ways to cushion the significant blow the sudden outage would have on forecasts this hurricane season.
The Defense Department claimed the access had to be shut off immediately because the software used by the satellites is old and not as secure as it oughta be, so they’d just shut it off and hurricane forecasters would probably be just fine until replacement satellites become operational one of these days.
Lowry acknowledged those security concerns are valid, but added that the decision to just cut off the data instead of patching the possible cybersecurity holes “doesn’t appear to weigh the risk the premature outage poses to U.S. national security and critical DOD facilities around the world.”
The original shutoff date for the “Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder” (SSMIS) instruments that are on the Navy satellites was set for late June, but after scientists asked the Defense Department if it was out of its fucking mind, the deadline was extended to July 31. The data from those instruments is used by forecasters in weather agencies around the world to predict the location and intensity of hurricanes and cyclones, although we should note that only America First weather matters now.
As Lowry explained in a post on Monday, extending the deactivation date by a month, supposedly to give meteorologists time to find data that was just as good, was no solution at all, since there aren’t any real equivalents. In response to concerns from meteorologists when the data cutoff was announced in June, a NOAA statement suggested forecasters turn to data from other sources still available from NOAA. One, which is installed on NOAA satellites, is the “Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder” (ATMS); the statement called its data “the richest, most accurate satellite weather observations available.”
But you don’t need a weatherman to see that its microwave imagery of Hurricane Erick, in June, isn’t nearly as detailed as the SSMIS imagery:
Lowry noted that the scientists at NOAA know perfectly well that the two systems — and other available data sources — aren’t at all equivalent. He diplomatically refrained from speculating that the NOAA statement was written by one of the agency’s new Trumpian political overseers, but we don’t have to keep working with them, so we’ll say that’s exactly what it sounds like.
Fortunately, that appears to be a moot point, because this time, scientists and experts seem to have gotten word to the Defense Department before everything was shut down, instead of the more familiar pattern where the administration lays everyone off, throws entire offices into the landfill, and then realizes that we actually needed that stuff.
Lowry reported Tuesday that the DOD got an earful from meteorologists, and wonder of wonders, took appropriate action:
In a statement issued to me this afternoon, a Navy spokesperson credited feedback it received about the Department of Defense’s move to sunset the satellites early for their eleventh-hour decision to keep the data flowing. “Officials found a way to meet modernization goals while keeping the data flowing until the sensor fails or the program formally ends in September 2026,” a Navy spokesperson told me.
I also spoke with NOAA who confirmed with me they would continue to receive data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) which owns and operates the three weather satellites. “NOAA will continue to have access to data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program for the duration of the Program’s life span,” NOAA said in a statement.
Other scientists who work with the computer models used to predict hurricanes also confirmed to Lowry that since the data won’t be interrupted, their forecasts this summer “won’t suffer any hiccups.”
So hooray, crisis averted for now, and isn’t it a heck of a thing that once the DoD heard and paid attention to the scientists’ warnings that losing this data could put lives in danger, the Navy figured out a way to patch those cybersecurity problems after all? And hooray too for all the experts who raised their voices, too. Pushback works. Not always, and not with every part of the Trump regime. (Just Yr Wonkette speculating, but what if these had been NASA satellites? Crom only knows whether acting administrator Sean MTV would have allowed the data flow to continue uninterrupted.)
But that still leaves a big question that congressional Democrats should absolutely investigate: Until the right experts were heard by the right people in Defense, all we had was a peremptory announcement that the data would be cut off in the middle of hurricane season. If a security patch could be rolled out so quickly once that case was made, why wasn’t a patch the plan from the beginning?
That’s no way to keep Americans safe.
Also too, in more disturbing, but expected, climate news, the EPA announced yesterday that it will formally repeal the 2009 scientific finding that gives the agency the legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases (Washington Post gift link). The science hasn’t changed: Climate change it still very real and very dangerous, but we have a president who says the science doesn’t matter and carbon dioxide is harmless now. We will address that in an upcoming post!
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[WaPo (gift link) / Eye on the Tropics / Eye on the Tropics]
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