Trump Administration Will Blind Hurricane Forecasters Starting July 31st , says Data Sharing will be Permanently Disabled
The
Trump administration is about to make life a lot harder for meteorologists predicting when and where hurricanes are going to hit the United States. Last week, the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association announced that it would no longer provide information from military satellites that have been relied on heavily to determine a hurricane’s path. The satellites, which orbit the Earth’s poles, use microwaves to look inside the storm, offering experts important data on rapid intensification — the dangerous process of a hurricane growing in speed or size before making landfall, made
more frequent by climate change. The change will take effect on July 31, just as the peak of hurricane season begins.
Since the announcement was made, meteorologist and former FEMA official Michael Lowry has been
speaking out about the
change, which could make this season more dangerous for tens of millions of Americans in the hurricane belt.
Can you explain what these microwave-radiation satellites do that other satellites cannot?
For hurricane researchers and forecasters, the biggest capability that it gives us is the ability to peer through the clouds that we can’t typically see through using conventional satellites. We can see the structure of the hurricane itself — in particular the structure of the eyewall, which is the strongest part. We can tell how strong a hurricane currently is, but it also gives us indication of how strong it could become.
In the last ten years, we’ve been able to use that as a really impressive tool in our arsenal to detect when these cases of rapid intensification may happen. And you’ve seen that in the improvement in the intensity forecast. That’s an area that’s been a real challenge for the science, but the inclusion of this microwave data has been a boon for forecasting. That’s a capability that looks like it’s going to be turned off here at least on half of the satellites from which there are available data sometime within the next month.
Let’s say the administration sticks to that August 1 deadline. What do hurricane forecasts look like when the season starts to ramp up in the late summer?
When you turn off half the satellites available to us, we have half the data available today. For most people, you go,
Well, you have other satellites; just use the other satellites. The problem is that these are low-orbiting satellites that are up about 500 or so miles above Earth versus satellites that are 22,000 miles up that can see a wider area. Those lower-orbit satellites are giving us little swaths and they hit the same place on Earth twice a day, and you hope that it just happens to hit where the hurricane is. And oftentimes they miss; oftentimes they sideswipe. So what you’re left with is cobbling together the available swaths that you get from these microwave satellites.
You’ve got to basically hit a bullseye with these other satellites to get the information that you get from those Defense satellites with microwave radiation. Even if those Defense satellites just get the edge, they’re super-useful. You don’t have to be perfectly spot-on over the storm. You could be half on it and still see,
Oh, okay, we have two eye walls that are going on right now, and that tells us a tremendous amount of information. The other satellites are just kind of blurry, and in many cases they’re useless.
What justification did NOAA give for shutting down this microwave satellite data?
That these satellites don’t last forever, and we kind of expected that they would probably become not operational within the next year and a half. But they still work.
We still haven’t been given really good reason for the sudden termination of the data itself. If the satellites are still working and we can still receive the data, then why can’t we see it? We’ve been told it’s something related to cybersecurity. But what’s curious about all of this is that what they’re saying is it’s a permanent discontinuation of the data. It’s not — we’re going to turn it off and see how we can fix the security issue.
And then another curious thing was that we were given a moratorium on this for July 1. But if it were a true immediate security issue, then why are we allowing, why is the Defense Department allowing us to see the data for another month?
With those questions of motivation, it does seem to fit within the larger cuts toward NOAA or FEMA that the administration has proposed thus far.
I reached out to NOAA, I reached out to the Department of Defense, I reached out to Space Force. I’ve reached out to the Navy, and I’ve not received comments as to the rationale behind this aside from it being a cybersecurity issue.
There are other groups that use these microwave-radiation satellites, but one of the big uses is to track sea ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic regions. That’s given us this continuous record of sea-ice data that goes back to the late 1970s. So this data from these satellites is obviously important for issues related to climate and climate change.
Is there an example of a past hurricane in which the data from these satellites has been able to save lives? Or is it so integrated into the process that it’s every time?
Every time might be an overstatement, but not by much.
I would have no other way of confidently being able to tell you how a hurricane is developing aside from a hurricane-hunter airplane flying into the storm. They don’t do that regularly out in the eastern Pacific. Even in the Atlantic, one or two in every three forecasts that are issued are issued without the benefit of hurricane-hunter data from the airplanes. The airplanes just can’t fly 24/7 all year round. So these microwave-radiation satellites are the only other way that we have to know what’s going on structurally inside of the hurricane.
This satellite decision comes as Trump proposes a cut to the entire research arm of NOAA. How would that impact hurricane forecasting?
The budget would eliminate NOAA’s office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.
It is everything for us when it comes to forecasting hurricanes. It would be a generational loss for hurricane forecasting. The tools that we rely on regularly to forecast hurricane intensity, to forecast the track of hurricanes, all come from this office that is being completely eliminated. Within this office are over a dozen research laboratories and nonprofit cooperative institutes that are affiliated with 80 different universities.
It’s nonsensical why it would be eliminated. But what you do have to realize, again, and this is just stating a fact here, is that many of these offices and their programs are affiliated with climate research.
This is huge. This is not a situation where you say, “Okay, well, the budget is passed as it’s proposed and we wait four years and a new administration comes in. And we put it back to where it was.” Once you’ve shuttered these world-class research laboratories and all these experienced scientists go off into the world, you can’t just cobble that back together. It took us 50, 75 years in some cases to put these institutions together.
If you went to the NOAA website, it would be like, “Hey, we don’t have the data that you’re looking for.”