US Defense Department will stop providing satellite weather data
text.npr.orgAs a non-American who's life has been previously saved by knowing that a typhoon would strike my home this has me wondering how we will be affected. A lot of smaller countries don't have the infrastructure/man power to maintain a space program. To what extent is the rest of the world reliant on this data and what does this mean for us? Will we still have predictions? How does international collaboration on meteorology generally work? Do Europeans/Chinese/Indians/Russians also share data about weather?
Such hyperbolic comments!
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...
I see 3 possibilities: They're cutting it off to limit bad news about climate change, for political reasons. Or they're trying to set up some private company to sell the same data.
Or (tinfoil hat on) they're going to do something the raw microwave data might expose and so they're trying to keep the microwave data secret.
There's no mystery, this is the execution of Project 2025. https://envirodatagov.org/project-2025-annotation/
There's a 4th possibility: This program was cancelled in 2015 and it finally ended.
The replacement is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Polar_Satellite_System
The JPSS is complementary. The replacement for the DMSP satellites are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_System_Follow-on_Micro...
Also historically happens during wartimes: https://niemanreports.org/press-access-to-satellite-images-i...
Here is what will be denied to NOAA, now and going forward
Defense Department data also allow hurricane forecasters to see
hurricanes as they form, and monitor them in real-time.
For example, hurricane experts can see where the center of a
newly formed storm is, which allows them to figure out as
early as possible what direction it is likely to go, and whether
the storm might hit land. That's important for people in harm's way,
who need as much time as possible to decide whether to evacuate,
and to prepare their homes for wind and water.
> NOAA, which oversees the National Hurricane Center, says the loss of the Defense Department data will not lead to less-accurate hurricane forecasts this year. In a statement, NOAA communications director Kim Doster said, "NOAA's data sources are fully capable of providing a complete suite of cutting-edge data and models that ensure the gold-standard weather forecasting the American people deserve."
Kim Doster is a Trump appointee who worked on Musk’s super pac. Her previous position was as a climate change denial specialist. Pardon my skepticism that we can believe anything she has to say. The Trump administration is a big fan of hiring Iraqi information minister wannabes as their spokespeople.
> Iraqi information minister wannabes
I’ve been thinking about that guy once a week since this administration started.
> Her previous position was as a climate change denial specialist.
Predictions won't be less accurate because weather is beyond the comprehension of all people and no amount of data could change that.
I wouldn’t really expect a Trump administration spokesperson to put out a statement critical of the Trump administration’s decision.
This is Congress 2015 decision. The Trump administration extended the deadline by another month.
The congressional decision was to scrap the continued development of the DMSP satellites, not to decommission the existing ones or stop the data sharing arrangement. The DoD confirmed the DMSP is still operating and will continue to do so but the data sharing is what they have now decided to cut off.
It also looks like one of the “next-generation” systems, the JPSS, has been ordered to operate in maintenance mode.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/amid-trump-cuts-n...
Well, the history of the existing satellites shows that many of them have exploded:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Meteorological_Satelli...
AFAIK, Congress voted in 2015 to terminate the whole DMSP program. There was no mention of continuation of "data sharing" or anything like that, as you suggest. I guess in the DOGE budget cleanup of DoD, terminated programs are really being terminated instead of continuing to operate under the radar.
Regarding JPSS - that article says that new JPSS satellites are scheduled to be launched. I agree that the "minimum mission operations approach" doesn't make much sense if that is the case. My guess is that this is a stupid cost cutting move that will most likely be rolled back after pushback.
>The public paid for this data.
Someone should file weekly FOIA requests.
Didn’t they axe everyone who handles FOIA?
Wow, they'll literally kill American citizens and American citizens will still overwhelmingly vote for them...
The margin wasn't overwhelming. But if you include the number of people who could have done something about it but failed to, yeah, an overwhelming number allowed it to happen. And, as far as I can tell, will continue to.
Generally the outcome of voting for criminals, thieves, and conmen/women.
And then people wonder why they are erecting spikes around the White House and the Treasury. The pillaging has begun.
> it would be ...
lots of ways to fill in that part. iterating the words seems worth the effort. Thinking out loud, there are readers with frame of reference, and movements or politics-in-practice that have frames of reference, in the messaging .. So making a 2x2 square and filling it in.. you can write for the readers and refine, you can align with movements or their spokespersons and refine, all combined with you yourself representing what you are about.
So to complete the exercise.. how many readers of YNews would respond to "that is evil" wording.. how many movements or politics-in-practice would say "that is evil" as part of their outfacing communications.. and how strongly to you, the writer, want to associate the concepts of "that is evil" with respect to other things that you say or think are important.
I write this pedantic screed because this is so, so critical to communicate right now. The narrow rocky valley pass in which to lay an ambush, is completely in place.. the budget strings. Everyone knows that this is raw executive power in action.. it is to be, because I say so, implemented via the purse. I am not sure how much to include those backdrop statements in any impactful messaging though, because "there is no bad news in sales" and popularity or adaption is part of the task.
oh this is great "Weather: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver"
This is example number 7748492 of how the decline of America will be practically irreversible once a political machine with any kind of rational worldview is in charge again. It took a century to build some of the things that are being destroyed in days or weeks. We're looking at the fall of rome. The only question now is whether a dark age follows or whether someone else takes over.
This is part of Project 2025 to destroy the NOAA. [0]
> Break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
> "fully commercialize" the National Weather Service's forecasting operations.[1]
One of arguments seems to be based on climate change denial
"Together, these [six main offices of NOAS] form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable"
"Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area."
> "Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area."
Absolutely mind-boggling that someone can put that in writing with a straight face.
> climate change alarm industry
Ah yes, that very infamous industry of selling... alarm... for climate change. As opposed to Small Oil, which we all know is a very tiny industry that doesn't influence anything.
A lot of very specific things in the original source: https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...
I found this one funny:
Right next toOverlap exists between the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Overly simplified, the NMFS handles saltwater species while the Fish and Wildlife Service focuses on fresh water. The goals of these two agencies should be streamlined.
Yikes.Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area.What in the actual fuck. I can’t believe they are actually doing all those little petty things.
Genuine - did you think it was exaggerated in the media or that they wouldn't? A lot of people seem to have not taken it seriously around 2023, even though it was a very detailed plan with legal strategies, implementations and bills, etc in there.
They say all cynics used to be idealist. That’s another way of saying the idealist and cynic have the same essence.
The cynic can actually think “oh that project 2025 stuff, that’s just red meat for their base, they went actually do it”, but that’s because neither the cynic nor the idealist can face reality (remember, the cynic and idealist transform between each other).
The horror of reality is the raw hard reality, and there’s no cynicism or idealism that can prepare you for it - both were always a coping mechanism.
A lot of people didn’t take it seriously because the RNC lied about distancing themselves from the Project 2025, which is a meaningless statement that even Democrats believed. It doesn’t really matter if the RNC distances themselves though does it?
They're not just petty, they're wildly impractical.
You can't privatise NOAA and the services it offers. It cannot work at an equivalent level as a private service. Its effectiveness relies on being able to decide what's valuable in purely scientific terms, and those terms don't align with short-term corporate greed.
But if you ask these cranks what NOAA actually does, they'll have no clue. They're not just evil, they're stupid - the smallest, most banal bureaucrats, cosplaying radicals.
They're not trying to privatize NOAA; they're trying to shut it down.
NWS is what they're trying to privatize.
Yes the conflation is my bad because I think this move is relative to NWS privatization, which is what might strike most people. You can’t have the government predicting and tracking major weather events and issues, those are the biggest datasets to sell access too.
For other NOAA fallout effects in the government, a Potus wouldn’t have to rob from the FEMA funds if there’s nothing for FEMA to prepare for, in that FEMA cannot say we need to spend money to help flooding in Texas or hurricane damage in Florida. No cancel that and put that money into the tax break or 1% monetary “business investment” funnel fund. [0] [1]
[0] https://www.project2025.observer/?search=flood
[1] https://www.project2025.observer/?search=Fema&sort=agency-de...
>It cannot work [...] as a private service
But with public contracts it can be a very effective way to line ones pockets with tax payer money.
Yes as warned and ignored.
Literally had this report for years and literally heard the current president praise and endorse it on a hot mic. The fact that, presumably, educated people, are still acting surprised (or worse, legitimately are ignorant) when the reic-i mean presidency was explicitly planned out, in a commissioned by the wealthy, public to all, report by the most connected conservative think tank in the country.
Is this an attempt at controlling the narrative around climate change, in line with the impacts at NOAA and other climate-related government agencies?
Don’t look up!
The timing is just, it's atrocious. Okay, at this very moment, I say we sit tight and assess.
^ I’m pretty sure this is a quote from the movie Don’t Look Up, if that’s why y’all are downvoting this comment
That's what got us here in the first place, maybe stop doing that.
"Sit tight and assess" as used above is probably a reference to the movie "Don't Look Up" from a few years ago, which (heavy-handedly) parodied administrations like Trump I (and which unortunately seem much less like parody in the Trump II era).
having literally never heard of this, despite being in North America, it's a good idea to not make assumptions about who's seen which pop culture thing.
To where? Stock market ath and free AI for the masses?
Yes. Quoting Projct 225:
> Break Up NOAA ... NOAA consists of six main offices ... Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized. NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.
https://envirodatagov.org/project-2025-national-oceanic-and-...
Tldr: shut down NOAA to suppress climate change evidence, research, and preparedness; outsource to private industry the remaining parts that are considered directly useful for commerce.
Is it any wonder that the CEO of Accuweather Barry Myers was a Trump donor who became a NOAA head administrator appointee in Trump's first term? The appointment fortunately failed. Now they're trying again.
If we survive this, these people will go down in history as monsters.
What if they're the ones who survive and rewrite history
That's what they're betting on. It's why suppressing free public access to knowledge and education is part of the agenda.
Yet, many even here on HN will if not outright defend this, then let it slide, because there is one overarching goal which must not be compromised at any cost: to own the libs.
Then they will do everything in their power to pretend that they didn’t drag us into this.
Given that despite open knowledge nothing was done for >50 years about climate change, there's plenty of blame to go around. Hell, I like to compare the feedback vs the forcing and the feedback has been going down since 2018. Imho that can only mean the tipping point is very close.
History isn't written by the victors. It's written by historians.
Historians using highly biased sources from the victors.
Oh geez that… that is upsetting
No, this was cancelled by congress in 2015 and switched to the JPSS program which is running and active.
Could more than one thing be goin on?
> "There are cybersecurity concerns. That's what we're being told."
Anyone know what that's about?
> "There are cybersecurity concerns. That's what we're being told."
Let's try to make sense of that.
1) the cybersecurity talent from DoD and USG is so decimated it can't field a response to whatever this concern is or 2) the DoD has the talent to resolve whatever this concern is and they are deliberately leaving this concern in place or 3) the DoD is lying about a cybersecurity issue being the reason that they're withholding lifesaving data (from benefiting the public that paid for it).Fourth option: a cyber company that could potentially sell weather forecast data is loosing it's financial security because NOAA gives it away for free.
They want to privatize it for private gain and to shut down climate change alarms. It is in Project 2025.
it's sure great we have a blueprint that explains all of this in detail.
Okay and then what? There's already huge issues with getting home insurance in places like Florida, what will they do, force companies to offer it against their will and see them go broke? Convince people that insurance is woke? There are real problems that aren't going away, regardless of their beliefs.
The thinking is they will offer it at a high enough cost that they don't go broke. The problem is a lot of consumers, if not most, would be fine reading street signs or using mapquest.
Blamestorming, fingerpointing, and avoiding saying anything that might make Trump tweet about them in allcaps at 2am.
Good God. The Fall of civilizations episode for the United States will be galactically stupid. The Sumerians: climate change and soil degradation. The Assyrians: external tribes organizing against their brutality. The US: fox news, AM radio, and conspiracy theory uncle Facebook memes.
Strikingly succinct.
Podcasts.
Earlier:
Hurricane Forecasters Lose Crucial Satellite Data, with Serious Implications
Are the satellites being turned off, or could people with SDRs pick this up directly from space and offer it up for free?
They're DoD satellites, so encryption is a real possibility.
Yes, many weather satellites broadcast in frequencies accessible to amateur SDR setups (137-138MHz for NOAA polar orbiting satellites), though military weather satellites like DMSP use different frequencies and encryption that make civilian reception significantly more challenging.
saveitforparts actively vlogs about the weather satellite sdr stuff. It's an interesting thing to learn about
What unique weather monitoring does DoD have over civilian capabilities or other govs who has weather satellites?
No one agrees to this so why are we accepting this??
Because if you want the data go get it yourself.
O yes every person should launch their own cube sat. Come on.
“We shouldn’t keep trusting nation-states for meteorology data. They can and will cut off access if the powers that be demand it, even if it hurts billions of others by doing so.” - Me, circa mid-2010s
“You’re overreacting, nobody would be dumb enough to cut off access to data like that. Stop being alarmist.” - Everyone I have shared that thought with since.
Unfortunately, “I Told You So’s” don’t pay my rent, otherwise I’d have a decent home of my own by now. Here’s hoping ESA or JAXA help fill that gap until the UN can take over (an organization ideally suited for global meteorology tasks).
People probably reacted poorly to this because it's hard to disambiguate from "we shouldn't keep trusting nation-states for x [because I'm actively working to profit from providing an alternative]" from "[because I'm worried others will dismantle it despite my best efforts to prevent it]"
Michael Lewis, in the Fifth Risk, has a whole chapter on how during Trump 1 the head of Accuweather was basically trying to shut down free distribution of weather updates from NOAA/National Weather Service.
The reason:
For profit weather companies don't want free government weather updates going out to their potential customers.
PS. Having been on HN for many years and watched the full "disrupt old industries!" cycle, I'm not that surprised this is where we have ended up.
Its like dump said, they will start nuking the typhoons or whatever that shape is on the radar. Aint nobody got time for analysis
so now we get to pay for our weather forecasts twice, once for the military and once for us
The billionaire's mantra: "Anything free is communism! Gubberment bad!"
This is a sign of a larger effort to replay the fall of the Soviet Union in America: sell off public lands, privatize everything that was public, and charge more money and take on debt for worse services where funds are gifted as dividends to owners rather than providing value to customers because a powerful ruling class demands more money and more power.
> "It's not an issue of funding cuts," says Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a federally funded research center in Colorado that has relied on the soon-to-be-terminated Defense Department data **to track sea ice since 1979**. "There are cybersecurity concerns. That's what we're being told."
hmmmmmmmmmm
The rest of the world needs to club closer together, and quickly. The US is no longer a reliable ally.
It’s no longer a reliable place to live, either.
I've seen this argument a lot, but I don't see people clamoring to leave. I don't think anyone is taking makeshift boats to Cuba from the US, for example.
If you live in the US, are you actively looking to leave?
We are 5 months and 9 days into this Presidency.
Check back in a few more months.
No, because it’s not realistic for me - I’m not going to leave my siblings behind, nor my inlaws. If this was happening when I was single? I’d have been out before Trump took office the first time.
By all means please do and pay for it yourselves.
Heaven forbid the richest nation on earth that steals resources from everyone else contribute to global improvement.
Heaven forbid the rest of the world pays their own share of the bill. We’re not a charity. We treat our own people like shit, don’t expect to be treated better.
The lack of self-awareness here is incredible. Every Visa, Mastercard and PayPal transaction in my country results in us paying tax to the US. You think we couldn't develop our own card schemes?
US tech business gets tax free entry into our market. It uses our roads, our communications, our police and court system. All of this is to the detriment of our local business.
A huge amount of our defence spending goes directly to the US. We buy your planes even when we could make better ones ourselves. We have supported the US in nearly every colonial adventure since WW2.
Why do we allow ourselves to be milked like this? We are paying tribute to the US for being the ally of our colonial masters. Its time we stopped.
Yes all these things you don’t do yourselves because you can do it better, cheaper and faster. Listen to yourself.
You may recall that Europe has its own card schemes, but the UK doesn't join them, because of the 'special relationship'.
The UK was forced by the US to abandon TSR2, the best jet in the world, to get a cash bailout from the US, that it needed after all of the years fighting WW2 on its own...it spent all of its money buying material...from the USA. The UK invented lots of key military equipment, Radar, proximity fuses, nuclear bombs, jet engines, and gave them all to the US. It is about time the US paid us back, you leeches
I don't recall Europe having its own global card schemes.
The TSR-2 was abandoned due to cost overruns. The F-111 would have been cheaper...but even that was abandoned and eventually the Tornado came along...not a US aircraft.
The flow of military inventions flowed both ways during WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_technological_cooperati... Maybe if you hadn't had a coward as a leader in Chamberlain we wouldn't have had to bail you guys out (and lose ~250,000 Americans in Europe.)
>The TSR-2 was abandoned due to cost overruns. The F-111 would have been cheaper...but even that was abandoned and eventually the Tornado came along...not a US aircraft.
Well done for skim reading Wikipedia. That is pretty much the excerpt from the top of the page shortened even more to take out key details.
Tsr2 was cancelled in 1965. Tornado entered service in the 1980s. Big gap to have no planes at all...
>The F-111 would have been cheaper
"It was decided to order an adapted version of the General Dynamics F-111 instead, but that decision was also later rescinded as costs and development times increased."
Filled in the gap for you
Tsr2 was cancelled due to American blackmail, neo-colonial bullying. A skim read of Wikipedia doesn't refute it
When you light a lamp for someone else, it also brightens your path.
No, we're not a charity. We've just been the ones not paying our share of the bill. We've arranged it such that we have the best deal and we've gotten greedy now, so we are choosing to jeopardize that.
Much of the world is already VERY accustomed to the US treating it like shit
Feel free to spend a trillion dollars on your own DoD annually. Then you don’t need the US anymore. I’d be happy if we stopped policing the world as much as anyone else. And we could maybe spend our taxes on something more productive and useful to the people.
Just because the US spends so much on defence is not evidence that level of spending is required
Yep.
My hunch is that the location of the satellites can be deduced from the weather data. These satellites would be a target in a time of war.
The location of the satellites is public knowledge. Satellites are trivially tracked from the ground - the amateur community does this whenever someone tries to keep the location of one secret: https://www.popsci.com/zuma-spy-satellite-amateur-astronomer...
They also don't exactly move much, it takes precious fuel to change a satellites orbit.
Satellites using sun-synchronous orbits can circle the Earth multiple times in a day.Compared with a stationary observer on the ground,they are moving at a relatively fast speed.Therefore,as long as they delay the release of observational data by a random time period,there won't be this issue.Only geostationary satellites would have this problem.
But a bigger problem comes before the above issue:most of the current human meteorological satellites do not have stealth capabilities.You can see them directly.Perhaps your idea will become a practical problem when satellite stealth technology matures.
This is a translation.
I did not see your comment before I left mine! But yes the second half makes sense.
I do think you might able to deduce the orbit even if the data release is delayed by a random time period. If you’re a foreign adversary that has its own satellites, you can measure the same information from a known orbit. Then one could compare the published data with one’s known dataset to deduce things like the angle from which the data was measured.
Most plausible reason. National security hawks have always been extremely protective of intelligence even when the risk is tiny. Probably some DoD people (or person) wanted to keep it closed and new hawkish leadership let them do it.
Who knows, the Navy hasn't released any statement beyond "cyber security risks" so there's only politics to fill in the blanks.
It seems to be this agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_Numerical_Meteorology_an...
Who recently got a supercomputer system https://www.montereycountynow.com/news/local_news/a-new-supe...
So why does The King get to tweet pictures from our spy satellites then?
It's not even close to being a plausible reason when project 2025 states that this needs to happen.
Hmm I think I’m wrong. From what I can tell satellites , especially those in LEO can be optically tracked pretty easily
Yeah I was going to say: you can also know where satellites are by looking at them. Obviously we're not publishing weather data from the ones with important natsec equipment onboard.