Government to keep sharing key satellite data for hurricane forecasting despite planned cutoff
Defense officials had planned to cut off distribution of microwave data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, jointly run with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, by the end of June. At the time, NOAA said the cutoff was said 'to mitigate a significant cybersecurity risk" while the U.S. Navy said the program didn't meet "information technology modernization requirements.' The discontinuation was postponed for one month.
In a notice on Wednesday, officials said there would be no interruption at all.
The Navy said in a statement that its Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center 'had planned to phase out the data' as part of modernization efforts. "But after feedback from government partners, 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.'
The data is used by scientists, researchers and forecasters, including meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center. It gives crucial information about storms that can't be gleaned from conventional visible or infrared satellites.
'This satellite data enables hurricane forecasters and their computer models to peer inside a hurricane's structure, offering vital insight," said Union of Concerned Scientists science fellow Marc Alessi. "Make no mistake: this data not only improves hurricane forecasting accuracy, but could make the difference between whether communities evacuate or not ahead of an approaching hurricane.'
Other microwave data would have been available with this cutoff, but only about half as much, experts said — increasing the chance that forecasters would miss certain aspects of storms.
A spokesperson for NOAA said the agency will continue to have access to the data for the program's lifespan and noted that it is just one data set 'in a robust suite of hurricane forecasting and modeling tools" that the National Weather Service has at its disposal to 'ensure the gold-standard weather forecasting the American people deserve.'
The news had initially raised scientific eyebrows amid hurricane season, which usually peaks from mid-August to mid-October. Climate change, worsened by the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, have driven storms to become more frequent, severe and deadly.
'The last-minute reprieve has hurricane forecasters breathing a sigh of relief,' said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections. 'Loss of the microwave satellite data would have made it far more likely that timely warnings of dangerous and potentially deadly episodes of hurricane rapid intensification events being delayed by up to 12 hours.'
He added the restoration of the data is also good news for scientists tracking Arctic sea ice loss. Images and microwave satellite data can estimate how much of the ocean is covered by ice, according to NOAA.
NOAA and the NWS have been the subject of several cuts throughout President Donald Trump 's second term.
___
Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.
___
___
The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
2 hours ago
- Reuters
General Matter signs lease with US energy department to enrich uranium
Aug 5 (Reuters) - General Matter, a U.S. startup hoping to enrich uranium for fueling nuclear reactors, signed a lease with the Department of Energy on Tuesday to build a facility at a former federal plant in Kentucky. The $1.5-billion project will be at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The U.S. built the site in the 1950s to produce enriched uranium, initially for nuclear weapons. The facility later produced enriched uranium for nuclear reactors, but closed in 2013. Construction is expected to begin in 2026, with operations planned for 2034, the DOE said. The plant is expected to create about 140 permanent jobs, the company said. General Matter CEO Scott Nolan said reactivating the site would "power a new era of American energy independence." General Matter held a ceremony in Paducah attended by Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, U.S. senators and representatives, and DOE officials. The company did not say how much enriched uranium it will produce. While UK-based Urenco has the capacity to supply about a third of U.S. commercial reactor needs of enriched uranium from a plant in New Mexico that is expanding, the U.S. is heavily dependent on foreign suppliers, including Russia. Former President Joe Biden put a ban on Russian enriched uranium imports that allows waivers until 2028. General Matter is one of several companies that have received DOE grants to produce both low-enriched uranium, or LEU, and a special fuel called high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU. The companies need to get licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. HALEU could be used in high-tech reactors that plan to start operating around 2030. General Matter did not reveal the technology it plans to use to enrich uranium, nor the funding of the project. It said this year it was "incubated within" Founders Fund, a venture capital fund, in which Nolan is a partner. The DOE said the lease provides General Matter with at least 7,600 cylinders of uranium hexafluoride to supply fuel that can be enriched into reactor fuel. The process will save Americans about $800 million in avoided disposal costs, the DOE said. Global Laser Enrichment, a company owned by Silex Systems ( opens new tab and Cameco ( opens new tab that is one of six that won initial U.S. contracts to produce domestic uranium fuel, also plans to enrich uranium in Paducah. It plans to use lasers to enrich rather than centrifuges. "From a standpoint of technology readiness, from the regulatory timeline, no one's going to get an NRC license quicker than us," Nima Ashkeboussi, GLE vice president of government relations, said in an interview. GLE plans to enrich tailings, or waste byproducts left over from the DOE's enrichment programs. General Matter said the "vast majority" of the uranium it will enrich will be from domestic sources. The DOE is reserving tailings for it to enrich in the event of supply shortages, it said.
BreakingNews.ie
2 hours ago
- BreakingNews.ie
Sydney Chandler describes experience on the Alien: Earth TV series as ‘a joy'
Sydney Chandler has described her first experience of leading a cast in the new sci-fi drama Alien: Earth as a 'joy'. The 29-year-old American actress plays Wendy, a humanoid robot with human consciousness, in Emmy-winning producer Noah Hawley's new series based on the acclaimed franchise. Advertisement The Alien franchise began with Sir Ridley Scott's 1979 film starring Sigourney Weaver as warrant officer Ellen Ripley, who takes on an extra-terrestrial lifeform called the Xenomorph. The new eight-episode series sees Wendy and a group of tactical soldiers make a discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet's greatest threat. Director Noah Hawley and producer David W Zucker with the cast of Alien: Earth (Ian West/PA) Chandler, who starred in Olivia Wilde's psychological thriller Don't Worry Darling and Danny Boyle's miniseries Pistol, about the Sex Pistols, said she was lucky to have such a supportive cast for her first lead role. 'I felt like every day I was showing up to an incredible acting class,' Chandler told the PA news agency. Advertisement 'I'm new to this game, and so it was just a joy to be able to work with such a supportive and such a giving cast who were there to play.' Speaking of her character, she said: 'There's so many layers to her and she's just a juicy character to jump into. 'I did as much prep as you can for a character, there's no research you could do. 'I really found my character once I started working off everybody.' Advertisement Alien: Earth is set in the year 2120, when the Earth is governed by five corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic and Threshold. In this corporate era, cyborgs and synthetics, which are humanoid robots with artificial intelligence, exist alongside humans, but the world is changed when the founder of the Prodigy corporation unlocks a technological advance: hybrids (humanoid robots infused with human consciousness). Wendy, the first hybrid prototype, marks a new advance in the race for immortality and after Weyland-Yutani's spaceship collides into Prodigy City, Wendy and the other hybrids encounter new and terrifying life forms. The cast includes Deadwood actor Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, Black Mirror star Alex Lawther as Hermit, Mary And George's Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier, Guerrilla actor Babou Ceesay as Morrow and Bottom star Adrian Edmondson as Atom Eins. Advertisement Samuel Blenkin plays Boy Kavalier in Alien: Earth (Ian West/PA) Blenkin said the filming experience was made a lot easier due to Hawley's practical approach to special effects. 'We were lucky on this show because we're not doing much acting with tennis balls or anything like that that you do in a show where there's a lot of CGI,' the 29-year-old actor explained. 'Noah was really intent upon everything being practical. 'There's no acting required when Cameron, the vegan New Zealander, is wearing a Xenomorph suit and is leering over you and drooling, and it's animatronic and it's real. Advertisement 'It was just a joy. We turn into kids on those sets.' Hawley, who is best known for creating the Fargo TV series, said the 'imperfections of reality are scarier than the sort of bloodlessness of computer-generated images'. 'All I'm trying to do is create the same feelings that you had when you watched Ridley's film or James Cameron's film,' the 57-year-old writer and director explained. 'Some of that we're able to achieve in new ways, but some of it is literally going back to the original cinema of optical illusions.' Alien: Earth will launch on Disney+ on August 13th.
Medical News Today
3 hours ago
- Medical News Today
Popular artificial sweetener may negatively affect cancer immunotherapy
Non-sugar, or artificial, sweeteners are widely used to reduce the energy in sweetened foods and drinks, particularly those marketed as diet, or low or no concerns about their possible health effects include links to gastrointestinal problems, metabolic effects, and even increased cancer a study has found that one of the most widely used artificial sweeteners, sucralose, could adversely affect cancer researchers suggest that by changing the gut microbiome, sucralose decreases the effectiveness of immunotherapy for several cancers. Health concerns regarding sucralose have mainly centered around its potential to cause systemic inflammation, metabolic diseases, disruptions in gut microbiota, liver damage, and toxic effects at the cellular a study suggests that people whose diet includes large amounts of sucralose, e.g., from diet drinks, respond less well to cancer immunotherapy than those who consume less or none of the research, which is published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association of Cancer Research, found that sucralose changed the gut microbiota so bacteria degraded an amino acid, arginine, that immune cells need to be able to destroy cancer are experts worried about sucralose?Sucralose is one of six non-sugar sweeteners approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use as additives in the food and drinks industry — the others are aspartame, advantame, neotame, saccharin, and acesulfame potassium (Ace-K).It is made by replacing 3 hydroxyl (oxygen and hydrogen) groups in sucrose (table sugar) molecules with chloride resulting sucralose is up to 650 times sweeter than sucrose and, because people cannot digest it, contains no accessible energy. Therefore, it is widely used to sweeten foods and drinks, as well as being sold as an alternative to sugar for those trying to decrease their energy intake. However, there are concerns, both about its health effects and its efficacy for helping weight loss. In 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) advised that non-sugar sweeteners should not be used for weight control, saying that: 'Replacing free sugars with NSS [non-sugar sweeteners] does not help with weight control in the long term. […] NSS are not essential dietary factors and have no nutritional value. People should reduce the sweetness of the diet altogether, starting early in life, to improve their health.'Investigating the sucralose-cancer linkDiwakar Davar, MD, associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and a medical oncologist and hematologist at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, senior author of the study, told Medical News Today:'We think this finding is highly significant as it could have immediate positive impacts on cancer patients receiving immunotherapy. The fact that we not only identified sucralose as a potential problem for those receiving immunotherapy, but that we also found a way to fix this problem through arginine supplementation is exciting and something that could be put into clinical practice easily.'According to Jack Jacoub, MD, a board certified medical oncologist and medical director of MemorialCare Cancer Institute at Orange Coast and Saddleback Medical Centers in Orange County, CA, who was not involved in this research, the findings were significant.'Frankly, this is a superb piece of scientific work,' Jacoub told MNT. 'The authors were able to study preclinical models (mice) and draw conclusions related to the effect of high sucralose intake on T-cell function tumor response to immunotherapy.''They then took this understanding and later tested it in prospective enrolled patients with lung cancer and melanoma. They showed that patients consuming sucralose greater than 0.16 mg/kg/d [milligram per kilogram per day] had inferior response to immunotherapy,' he explained.'Recognizing the significance of arginine on T cell functions they then went back to the mouse model and proved giving it restored T cell function and benefit to immunotherapy in mice. In my opinion, this is high quality evidence suggesting this absolutely needs more exploration,' added decreased immune responseIn their study, the researchers included 132 patients who had undergone immunotherapy or chemoimmunotherapy for advanced/metastatic melanoma or advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). They also included 25 patients who had high-risk resectable melanoma. All participants had completed a Diet History Questionnaire III (DHQ III), had received at least 3 months of treatment, had at least one post-treatment imaging study evaluable for response and had been followed up for at least 6 months from the start of the diet questionnaire, researchers calculated each patient's non-nutritive sugar (NNS) intake (mg/day) and divided it by their weight in kg to get a weight-normalized average daily intake of mg/kg/ with melanoma or non-small cell lung cancer who consumed high levels of sucralose (more than 0.16mg/kg/day) had a worse response to immunotherapy, and poorer survival rates, than those with diets low in the artificial whether people undergoing cancer immunotherapy should try to avoid sucralose in their diets, lead author Abby Overacre, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, told MNT:'We are working on future prospective clinical trials to ask these sorts of questions for patients undergoing immunotherapy. Based on what we know so far, we would recommend that patients minimize intake of non-nutritive sweeteners, particularly sucralose.'Jacoub agreed with this assessment, saying that: 'This is enough information for me to recommend this to my patients. Frankly, we are talking about cancer and giving up diet soda, etc. is not difficult and directly goes to the question patients and their family commonly ask every day when I see them which is 'What can I do to help treat my cancer?'.'It is important to note that the research is still in the early stages, and this may not apply to all cancer microbiota changes reduced T-cell activityThe researchers then carried out tests in two mouse models of cancer to determine how high sucralose consumption reduced the immunotherapy found that mice fed sucralose were resistant to immunotherapy, had significantly increased tumor growth, less CD8+ T cell infiltration, and were more likely to T-cells are immune cells that produce the most powerful anti-cancer response, so their reduced function meant the immunotherapy was less effective. In the sucralose-fed mice, the researchers discovered changes in the gut microbiota, with greater numbers of gram positive bacteria that degraded arginine, an amino acid that is essential for T-cell production.'Gram positive bacteria have been associated with poorer immunotherapy efficacy in previous studies. However, we are very focused and interested in the function of these bacteria in hopes to better understand how they may directly contribute to cancer growth and immunotherapy response.'— Abby Overacre, PhDArginine supplements may counteract sucralose's effectsWhen researchers fed arginine or citrulline (which is metabolized in the body to arginine) to the mice, immunotherapy became effective again. They suggest that arginine or citrulline supplements could be given to people undergoing cancer immunotherapy to counteract the effect of sucralose in their diet. But could people undergoing cancer immunotherapy get enough arginine from their diet?'While there are certainly foods that are higher in arginine, especially in diets associated with better immunotherapy responses (nuts/seeds, poultry, lentils, fruits), a supplement may help those who struggle to achieve a high amount or arginine from diet alone,' Overacre told addition to continuing their research into sucralose and immunotherapy, the researchers hope to investigate whether other non-nutritive sweeteners have similar effects.'We hope that this study can help patients currently receiving immunotherapy. Importantly, this gives patients something they can do themselves or alongside their physicians to potentially improve their overall care.'— Abby Overacre, PhD
