Trump terminates satellite data considered crucial to storm forecasting

E&E News

a day ago

A Department of Defense weather satellite program that collects vital information for hurricane forecasts will stop distributing data products to users Monday.
The termination of data products from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program could lead to dangerous declines in the quality of hurricane forecasts, meteorologists say. That's especially worrying, they say, as the termination comes in the middle of this year's hurricane season.
'There is no sugar-coating it: hurricane forecasts will undoubtedly be worse after this loss,' said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane expert at the University of Miami, in an email to POLITICO's E&E News. 'For anyone near a hurricane-prone area, this is alarmingly bad news.'
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NOAA, which provides operational support for the program, issued a termination notice Wednesday. The agency did not provide reasons for the decision.
An official for the U.S. Space Force, which manages the program, confirmed that the satellites and their instruments are still fully functional. And the Defense Department will still have access to DMSP data.
But for the program's large network of users, the data products are going dark — and it's still unclear why.
The Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center is responsible for processing the program's data and sending it to NOAA for public distribution, the Space Force official said, noting that questions about the reasons for the termination should be directed to the Navy.
The Navy's press office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
DMSP has operated since the 1960s. It's a constellation of weather satellites collecting a variety of measurements used to track everything from thunderstorms to fog to snow and ice cover. Its data products are used by researchers around the world, including forecasters at the National Weather Service.
'Insanity'
One of the program's key capabilities is its specialized microwave sensor. This instrument provides detailed scans that allow scientists to effectively see through the tops of clouds and examine the weather systems below, including rain, ice and cloud structures closer to the surface of the Earth.
These microwave scans are crucial for accurate hurricane models, meteorologists say. They help scientists keep tabs on the way storms develop and intensify. They also help scientists pinpoint the location of tropical cyclones over the ocean, helping to narrow down track forecasts.
Microwave data is especially helpful for projecting rapid-intensification events, when hurricanes make sudden, extreme gains in wind speed over a short period of time.
Rapid intensification is notoriously difficult to predict, and it's famously dangerous — it can cause tropical storms to balloon into major hurricanes over the course of a day, leaving emergency managers little time to prepare. It's only in relatively recent years that scientists have made major strides in improving these forecasts.
Now, experts are worried that the loss of DMSP data will hamstring their models this hurricane season. DMSP accounts for as much as half of the microwave scans that help forecasters build their predictions.
'There is critical information that we can get from these satellites that we cannot get from more traditional visible or infrared satellites,' said scientist Philip Klotzbach, who leads Colorado State University's annual Atlantic hurricane forecasts, adding that the announcement was 'certainly a surprise to me.'
McNoldy, of the University of Miami, said that his 'gut reaction was disbelief' when he heard the news.
'Microwave data are already relatively sparse, so any loss — even gradual as satellites or instruments fail — is a big deal; but to abruptly end three active functioning satellites is insanity,' he added in an email.
Storm-chasing aircraft, like NOAA's famed Hurricane Hunters, can provide some of the same kinds of data supplied by microwave sensors. But these aircraft typically deploy only for Atlantic hurricanes expected to make landfall, and they're rarely used in the Pacific.
DMSP isn't the only satellite program that collects microwave scans. NASA has a satellite with similar capabilities, and so does at least one Japanese satellite, according to McNoldy. NOAA maintains three satellites with microwave sensors, but they operate at a lower resolution and tend to be less useful for detailed hurricane forecasts.
That makes DMSP one of the biggest single sources of high-quality microwave data.
Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist with WPLG-TV in Miami and a former scientist with NOAA's National Hurricane Center, estimates that DMSP provides roughly 50 percent of all available microwave scans to forecasters.
Without the DMSP scans, '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,' Lowry wrote in a Substack post yesterday.
Maria Torres, a public affairs officer with the National Hurricane Center, said in an email that National Weather Service models continue to incorporate data from a variety of other sources, including other satellites, Hurricane Hunter flights, buoys and ground-based instruments.
'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,' she said.
Extreme weather blind spots
The DMSP terminations are the latest in a string of cuts that experts say are blinding the country to the impacts of climate change.
Thousands of federal workers have already left the agencies responsible for climate and environmental monitoring, including NOAA, NASA and EPA. The White House's budget request for fiscal 2026 has proposed catastrophic cuts to climate and weather research programs, including the elimination of NOAA's entire research arm.
The impacts on extreme weather forecasts are top of mind for many experts at the moment.
Wildfires have raged across the country since the start of the year, with hundreds of active fires exploding across interior Alaska just this month. An unusually active tornado season killed dozens of people this spring. And hurricane season is underway, with forecasts predicting above-average activity this year.
Experts have warned that recent chaos at the agencies responsible for disaster forecasting and response, including NOAA and FEMA, could pose major safety issues when extreme weather strikes this summer.
Hurricane forecasts aren't the only scientific tools threatened by the DMSP losses. The program's data products also help scientists keep track of snow and ice cover around the globe.
The Arctic is one of the fastest-warming regions on Earth, heating up as much as four times faster than the rest of the globe. Some studies warn that the Arctic Ocean could begin to see ice-free summers within a matter of decades, with dramatic consequences for local ecosystems, economies and cultural practices.
Meanwhile, melting ice from Antarctica, Greenland and mountain glaciers around the world is the biggest driver of global sea-level rise, which poses an existential threat to coastal communities and small island nations around the world as temperatures rise.
That makes polar research more critical now than ever, scientists say.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center issued two notices Wednesday warning that the DMSP terminations will affect a variety of its data products.
The center — a polar research institute at the NOAA-funded Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Colorado — said it is exploring alternative data sources. But it added that users 'should anticipate a gap in data availability' in the meantime.
Still, this summer's hurricane forecasts are among the most pressing potential casualties of the DMSP data losses.
'I worry that if we lose another tool we use to diagnose storms, it can be another thing that will make the forecasts a little bit harder,' said Andrew Hazelton, a hurricane model expert at the University of Miami and a former NOAA scientist who was fired amid the Trump administration's recent layoffs.
He said he didn't want to overstate the potential consequences of the losses but noted that there are very few other sources of high-quality microwave data for hurricane forecasts.
Other scientists expressed fears about the dangers to human life.
Posting on Bluesky early Thursday morning, hurricane researcher Jimmy Yunge shared a message he wrote to NOAA's Office of Satellite and Product Operations expressing his alarm.
'This decision will kill people,' he wrote. 'I seriously urge all of those involved to reverse this policy, and call on those who have any amount of leverage in the upper administration to push back at any and every level under moral and practical grounds.'