Budget cuts affect weather satellites

Predicting the weather is tricky enough. Now a new government-sponsored report warns that America's ability to track tornadoes, forecast hurricanes and study climate change is about to diminish. The number and capability of weather satellites circling the planet "is beginning a rapid decline" and tight budgets have significantly delayed or eliminated missions to replace them, according to a National Research Council analysis released Wednesday. The number of in-orbit and planned Earth observation missions by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is projected to drop "precipitously" from 23 this year to only six by 2020 based on information provided by both agencies, the report found. As a result, the number of satellites and other instruments monitoring Earth's activity is expected to decline from a peak of about 110 in 2011 to fewer than 30 by the end of the decade. "Right now, when society is asking us the hardest questions and the most meaningful questions, we're going to be even more challenged to answer them," said Stacey W. Boland, a senior systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and a member of the committee that wrote the report. "We'll slowly become data-starved here." The report, Earth Science and Applications from Space: A Midterm Assessment of NASA's Implementation of the Decadal Survey, credits NASA with finding creative ways to prolong the life of existing satellites and working with international partners to fill in forecasting gaps. But, the authors said, glue and scissors only go so far. When a similar analysis was issued five years ago, eight satellites were expected to be in space by 2012 tracking a variety of conditions, such as global precipitation, ocean topography and carbon emissions. Only three are now in orbit. Of the remaining five, two failed, one was canceled and two others are not expected to launch until at least next year. The pipeline looks emptier over the next decade. Of the 18 missions recommended in the 2007 report through 2020, only two are close enough to completion to register launch dates. Dennis Hartmann, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle, and chair of the committee, warned that the loss of capacity will have "profound consequences on science and society, from weather forecasting to responding to natural hazards." NASA and NOAA are facing what all other government agencies are confronting: a record federal debt that has most in Congress talking about ways to cut programs, not expand them. The debt is approaching $15.7 trillion, or more than $50,000 per U.S. citizen, and even military leaders say the government's spiralling sea of red ink poses a huge threat to the nation's economic stability. Lawmakers and the Obama administration have treated NASA better than most agencies. Its budget for the fiscal 2013 year is proposed to be relatively flat, a small victory given that many other agencies are facing deep cuts. As a way to improve the efficiency of the nation's civilian satellite program, a key Senate panel voted last month to shift the acquisition — but not operation — of weather satellites from the NOAA to NASA. But even if Congress changed course today and decided to fund these missions, there would still be a lag because of the time it takes to build a satellite, Boland said. "Once you're even in implementation, it still takes several years to get from there to a launch pad," she said.