Latest news with #SSMIS
Atlantic
02-07-2025
- Climate
- Atlantic
Hurricane Science Was Great While It Lasted
Clouds are the bane of a hurricane forecaster's existence. Or they were, until about 20 years ago, when forecasters got access to a technology that Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona, told me to think of as cloud X-ray vision: It cuts through the cloud top to help generate a high-resolution, three-dimensional image of what's happening below. Known as the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder, or SSMIS, it rides on a series of satellites and allows forecasters to see a storm's structure, which might otherwise be invisible. The Hurricane Hunter planes that fly into storms can also be used to generate three-dimensional storm images, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is responsible for hurricane forecasting, has only two of those aircraft. They can't be everywhere at once. With the SSMIS, forecasters had an autonomous, powerful eye in the sky. But now the Department of Defense says it will cease processing and distributing the crucial imagery from this sensor at the end of this month. Losing these views threatens the National Hurricane Center's ability to see what's forming, Wood told me. For years, the National Hurricane Center has been improving the accuracy of its forecasts, and one short year ago, the United States was better at predicting storms' tracks than it had ever been. But the Trump administration has been cutting the forecasting staff and budgets. And now these satellite data will be missing too. The U.S. is rapidly losing state-of-the-art hurricane forecasting, just in time for hurricane season's busiest months. The data were nice while we had them. After all, no one likes a surprise hurricane. When the sun goes down, convective storms over open ocean often grow stronger, juiced by the changing temperature dynamics. But that's also when types of storm surveillance that rely on what's visible are least able to determine what's going on. Infrared imaging can see in the dark, but the picture is typically low-resolution and grainy, and can obscure key shapes. When the sun comes up, forecasters can suddenly be looking at a fully formed storm eye. Forecasters dread the 'sunrise surprise,' which is exactly the sort of thing that the microwave imagery from SSMIS is most helpful in preventing. It gives a clearer picture, even through clouds, and even in the dark. Plus, the technology is vital to picking up on telltale signs of rapid intensification, a phenomenon that has become more common in recent years, most notably with Hurricane Otis in 2023 and Hurricane Milton in 2024. Storms that intensify faster and reach higher peak intensities just before hitting land are a nightmare for forecasting, and climate scientists worry they will become only more common as the planet warms. Research suggests that certain signature formations in a storm could indicate that it may intensify rapidly, Andrew Hazelton, an associate scientist working in hurricane modeling and research at the University of Miami, told me. Those structures are simply easier to see with the SSMIS images. A few other satellites can provide microwave imaging. But, as the meteorologist Michael Lowry has pointed out, their instruments either are orbiting more infrequently or are inferior to the one being discontinued. NOAA suggested to Lowry that its Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder instrument would be able to fill the gap, he wrote. But that suggestion is misleading, Hazelton said: The information from that satellite is so low-resolution that the eye of a hurricane looks like just a few pixels instead of a more detailed image. 'It's really hard to pick out details,' he told me—including the aspects of a storm's structure that may signal that it could rapidly intensify. Plus, having fewer microwave instruments operating in the sky means fewer snapshots of oceans where hurricanes might form. Without SSMIS, the number of microwave-image glimpses that forecasters get over any given spot will be essentially cut in half, Lowry wrote; many more hours could go by without observations when they're most needed. (I reached out to NOAA for comment, but the agency redirected me to the Department of Defense.) SSMIS is part of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program; a Navy spokesperson told me the entire satellite program is slated to be discontinued in September 2026. When I asked about previous reports citing cybersecurity concerns as a reason for the closure, the Navy spokesperson responded only that the satellite program is 'no longer compliant with Department of the Navy information technology modernization requirements.' In the meantime, the Defense Department will just stop processing and distributing the data it collects. A spokesperson from the U.S. Space Force also told me the satellite system will be replaced by two other satellite systems, the second one of which is slated to be operational in 2027. But that still doesn't explain why this data stream is being cut off now, more than a year before the satellite program is slated to be decommissioned, Hazelton said. 'We need all the microwave data we can get while it's available.' These aren't the only data forecasters have lost, either: Right now, across the U.S., fewer weather balloons are being launched because of staffing shortages at National Weather Service forecasting offices. Balloons offer insights into how the atmosphere is behaving; data picked up on the West Coast are the East Coast's business, too, as they'll predict the weather coming just hours in the future. 'We want the complete picture of the state of the atmosphere so that we have a way to then estimate the next step,' Wood said. 'Upstream information is often just as critical as information right at the point where the storm might be.' NOAA is losing the experts who can interpret those data, too. And cuts to staff this year already mean that more duties are piled higher on individual people, 'which means they may be less able to properly use the data once it comes in,' Wood said. Those cuts extend all the way to the people who work on underlying weather models. Hazelton, for example, was on a team at the National Weather Service where he worked to improve hurricane modeling. In February, he was axed along with some 800 employees who had been recently hired; he'd worked for NOAA as a contract employee for nearly a decade, on Hurricane Hunter missions and improving storm modeling. He was part of the group of fired NOAA employees who were hastily rehired after a judge temporarily blocked President Donald Trump's cuts, and was refired after a subsequent Supreme Court ruling. At the University of Miami, he's now continuing his work on hurricane models through a federal partnership. The latest proposed NOAA budget for 2026, released Monday, aims to remove even more workers, along with whole programs. It zeroes out, for instance, the line item for the entire Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office, a network of federal research centers whose work helps develop new techniques and tools for forecasters and improve weather models. If this budget passes, the forecasts of the near future—three, five, 10 years down the line—will suffer too, Hazelton said. This year has been a miserable cascade of losses for the American hurricane-safety apparatus. Any one of these losses might have been papered over by other parts of the system. But now it's just losing too many components for that. As James Franklin, the former chief of the National Hurricane Center's hurricane-specialist unit, put it in a post on Substack, 'Resiliency is being stripped away, piece by piece.' What's easy to see coming now are the possible consequences: at best, a needless evacuation. But just as easily: a rushed evacuation, a surprise landfall, a flattened house.
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Meteorologists are losing vital tool for forecasting hurricanes as the season starts
Meteorologists are losing a sophisticated tool that many say has proved invaluable when monitoring and forecasting hurricanes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced in a service change notice this week that it would be ending the importing, processing and distribution of data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS). "This service change and termination will be permanent," wrote NOAA. The SSMIS instruments are part of three weather satellites in low-Earth orbit and are maintained by NOAA in cooperation with the United States Department of Defense. The SSMIS provides critical weather information that can't yet be replaced by other satellites and weather instruments, according to NOAA. The tool offers forecasters the ability to examine the inner workings of active tropical systems and understand their behavior. Specifically, SSMIS uses microwaves to penetrate clouds and obtain a clearer picture of the inner structure of a tropical cyclone, including its exact center. MORE: The strongest hurricanes to hit the US mainland and other tropical cyclone records Other weather satellites use visible and infrared imagery, which can only capture surface-level details of the cloud tops rather than what's happening inside the cyclone. These satellites are also ineffective after sunset when it's too dark to see and when direct observations over open water are scarce. Forecasters, therefore, rely on the data collected from the SSMIS system during these periods. The SSMIS data not only allows forecasters to better monitor the current progress of a tropical cyclone but also to identify the center of the system for weather forecast models. Weather forecast models are sensitive to initial weather conditions and rely on multiple sources of accurate weather data for forecasting. Any degradation or discontinuity in the data, whether in terms of quality or quantity, could negatively affect the model's forecasting skill, scientists warn. While there is other microwave data available to forecasters, SSMIS accounts for almost half of all microwave instruments, which would dramatically reduce the data available to forecasters. In a worst-case scenario, forecasters say it could lead to missing a tropical system that intensifies overnight, which would not be apparent from using infrared satellite imagery alone. The SSMIS system is part of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), which is operated by NOAA on behalf of the Defense Department's Space Force, which has satellite control authority. The DMSP program focuses on the design, development, launch, and maintenance of satellites that track weather patterns, oceanic conditions and solar-terrestrial physics. A Space Force official told ABC News the U.S. Navy is responsible for processing the SSMIS data and providing it to NOAA and they are referring all questions about the decision to the Navy, which did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment. In a statement, a Space Force official wrote that "satellites and instruments are still functional." The official added that Department of Defense users, including the Navy, "will continue to receive and operationally use DMSP data sent to weather satellite direct readout terminals across the DoD." MORE: Dangerous hurricanes are being made even worse because of climate change, study finds Scientists from around the country, meanwhile, expressed their concerns about the decision, stating that it will negatively impact the weather community's capabilities and accuracy in tracking life-threatening cyclones. Matthew Cappucci, an atmospheric scientist and senior meteorologist at @MyRadarWX wrote on X, "Please be aware that this change can and will have a negative impact on the forecasts relied upon by Americans living in hurricane-prone areas." Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist at ABC affiliate WPLG in Miami, wrote on his Substack blog, "The permanent discontinuation of data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS) will severely impede and degrade hurricane forecasts for this season and beyond, affecting tens of millions of Americans who live along its hurricane-prone shorelines." And Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, wrote on Bluesky that "For anyone near a hurricane-prone area, this is alarmingly bad news." Space Force told ABC News that while the U.S. Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) "is making a change on their end, the posture on sharing DMSP data has not changed," noting that NOAA has been making DMSP data publicly available, and that many non-Defense Department entities use this data.
Yahoo
28-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Meteorologists are losing vital tool for forecasting hurricanes as the season starts
Meteorologists are losing a sophisticated tool that many say has proved invaluable when monitoring and forecasting hurricanes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced in a service change notice this week that it would be ending the importing, processing and distribution of data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS). "This service change and termination will be permanent," wrote NOAA. The SSMIS instruments are part of three weather satellites in low-Earth orbit and are maintained by NOAA in cooperation with the United States Department of Defense. The SSMIS provides critical weather information that can't yet be replaced by other satellites and weather instruments, according to NOAA. The tool offers forecasters the ability to examine the inner workings of active tropical systems and understand their behavior. Specifically, SSMIS uses microwaves to penetrate clouds and obtain a clearer picture of the inner structure of a tropical cyclone, including its exact center. MORE: The strongest hurricanes to hit the US mainland and other tropical cyclone records Other weather satellites use visible and infrared imagery, which can only capture surface-level details of the cloud tops rather than what's happening inside the cyclone. These satellites are also ineffective after sunset when it's too dark to see and when direct observations over open water are scarce. Forecasters, therefore, rely on the data collected from the SSMIS system during these periods. The SSMIS data not only allows forecasters to better monitor the current progress of a tropical cyclone but also to identify the center of the system for weather forecast models. Weather forecast models are sensitive to initial weather conditions and rely on multiple sources of accurate weather data for forecasting. Any degradation or discontinuity in the data, whether in terms of quality or quantity, could negatively affect the model's forecasting skill, scientists warn. While there is other microwave data available to forecasters, SSMIS accounts for almost half of all microwave instruments, which would dramatically reduce the data available to forecasters. In a worst-case scenario, forecasters say it could lead to missing a tropical system that intensifies overnight, which would not be apparent from using infrared satellite imagery alone. The SSMIS system is part of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), which is operated by NOAA on behalf of the Defense Department's Space Force, which has satellite control authority. The DMSP program focuses on the design, development, launch, and maintenance of satellites that track weather patterns, oceanic conditions and solar-terrestrial physics. A Space Force official told ABC News the U.S. Navy is responsible for processing the SSMIS data and providing it to NOAA and they are referring all questions about the decision to the Navy, which did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment. In a statement, a Space Force official wrote that "satellites and instruments are still functional." The official added that Department of Defense users, including the Navy, "will continue to receive and operationally use DMSP data sent to weather satellite direct readout terminals across the DoD." MORE: Dangerous hurricanes are being made even worse because of climate change, study finds Scientists from around the country, meanwhile, expressed their concerns about the decision, stating that it will negatively impact the weather community's capabilities and accuracy in tracking life-threatening cyclones. Matthew Cappucci, an atmospheric scientist and senior meteorologist at @MyRadarWX wrote on X, "Please be aware that this change can and will have a negative impact on the forecasts relied upon by Americans living in hurricane-prone areas." Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist at ABC affiliate WPLG in Miami, wrote on his Substack blog, "The permanent discontinuation of data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS) will severely impede and degrade hurricane forecasts for this season and beyond, affecting tens of millions of Americans who live along its hurricane-prone shorelines." And Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, wrote on Bluesky that "For anyone near a hurricane-prone area, this is alarmingly bad news." Space Force told ABC News that while the U.S. Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) "is making a change on their end, the posture on sharing DMSP data has not changed," noting that NOAA has been making DMSP data publicly available, and that many non-Defense Department entities use this data.
28-06-2025
- Climate
Hurricane season is here and meteorologists are losing a vital tool for forecasting them
Meteorologists are losing a sophisticated tool that many say has proved invaluable when monitoring and forecasting hurricanes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced in a service change notice this week that it would be ending the importing, processing and distribution of data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS). "This service change and termination will be permanent," wrote NOAA. The SSMIS instruments are part of three weather satellites in low-Earth orbit and are maintained by NOAA in cooperation with the United States Department of Defense. The SSMIS provides critical weather information that can't yet be replaced by other satellites and weather instruments, according to NOAA. The tool offers forecasters the ability to examine the inner workings of active tropical systems and understand their behavior. Specifically, SSMIS uses microwaves to penetrate clouds and obtain a clearer picture of the inner structure of a tropical cyclone, including its exact center. Other weather satellites use visible and infrared imagery, which can only capture surface-level details of the cloud tops rather than what's happening inside the cyclone. These satellites are also ineffective after sunset when it's too dark to see and when direct observations over open water are scarce. Forecasters, therefore, rely on the data collected from the SSMIS system during these periods. The SSMIS data not only allows forecasters to better monitor the current progress of a tropical cyclone but also to identify the center of the system for weather forecast models. Weather forecast models are sensitive to initial weather conditions and rely on multiple sources of accurate weather data for forecasting. Any degradation or discontinuity in the data, whether in terms of quality or quantity, could negatively affect the model's forecasting skill, scientists warn. While there is other microwave data available to forecasters, SSMIS accounts for almost half of all microwave instruments, which would dramatically reduce the data available to forecasters. In a worst-case scenario, forecasters say it could lead to missing a tropical system that intensifies overnight, which would not be apparent from using infrared satellite imagery alone. The SSMIS system is part of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), which is operated by NOAA on behalf of the Defense Department's Space Force, which has satellite control authority. The DMSP program focuses on the design, development, launch, and maintenance of satellites that track weather patterns, oceanic conditions and solar-terrestrial physics. A Space Force official told ABC News the U.S. Navy is responsible for processing the SSMIS data and providing it to NOAA and they are referring all questions about the decision to the Navy, which did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment. In a statement, a Space Force official wrote that "satellites and instruments are still functional." The official added that Department of Defense users, including the Navy, "will continue to receive and operationally use DMSP data sent to weather satellite direct readout terminals across the DoD." Scientists from around the country, meanwhile, expressed their concerns about the decision, stating that it will negatively impact the weather community's capabilities and accuracy in tracking life-threatening cyclones. Matthew Cappucci, an atmospheric scientist and senior meteorologist at @MyRadarWX wrote on X, "Please be aware that this change can and will have a negative impact on the forecasts relied upon by Americans living in hurricane-prone areas." Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist at ABC affiliate WPLG in Miami, wrote on his Substack blog, "The permanent discontinuation of data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS) will severely impede and degrade hurricane forecasts for this season and beyond, affecting tens of millions of Americans who live along its hurricane-prone shorelines." And Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, wrote on Bluesky that "For anyone near a hurricane-prone area, this is alarmingly bad news." Space Force told ABC News that while the U.S. Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) "is making a change on their end, the posture on sharing DMSP data has not changed," noting that NOAA has been making DMSP data publicly available, and that many non-Defense Department entities use this data.
Int'l Business Times
27-06-2025
- Climate
- Int'l Business Times
Trump Admin Stops Collecting Data Crucial for Hurricane Predictions at the Start of Hurricane Season
Just weeks before the peak of hurricane season, the Trump administration has halted transmission of key satellite data used to predict storm intensity and track, prompting warnings that the move could "cascade into poorer forecasts" and leave coastal communities more vulnerable. On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Defense declared it would stop processing and transmitting microwave data collected from a trio of weather satellites jointly operated with NOAA, Local 10 News reported. These satellites provide crucial scans used by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) and others to detect storm structure, estimate intensity and track development over oceans where on-the-ground observations are limited or nonexistent. The move was formalized the next day in a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) service change notice and will take effect by June 30. The decision to cut off access to data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS) caught both the weather and national security communities by surprise. Though no official explanation has been given, the move reportedly stems from internal Department of Defense security concerns. As a result, nearly half of the microwave imagery used to monitor storms—especially in the Pacific, where hurricane hunting aircraft rarely operate—will go dark. The announcement comes just weeks into hurricane season, which lasts from June 1 to November 30. Peak season typically occurs between August and October, according to NOAA. Forecasters rely heavily on this data, especially at night and in developing systems, to detect rapid intensification or shifts in a storm's structure. Without it, experts warn, the risk of a "sunrise surprise" dramatically increases when critical overnight changes go undetected until the next day. Former NHC chief James Franklin emphasized that the real-time imagery isn't optional, calling it essential for storm positioning and accuracy. Forecast errors caused by small initial mistakes in storm tracking can multiply over just a few days, increasing the risk for millions along the coast. Originally published on Latin Times
