AT: Gaps in Coverage Now / NOAA-16 Satellite Retired

AT: Gaps in Coverage Now / NOAA-16 Satellite Retired

Retirement of NOAA-16 satellite won’t result in data gap

The deactivation process of NOAA-16 started this morning, with the final shut down occurring Monday (June 9, 2014) at 10:20 a.m. EDT. Launched in September 2000, NOAA-16 made 70,655 successful orbits of the globe, traveling more than 2.1 billion miles, while collecting huge amounts of valuable temperature, moisture and image data.

“NOAA-16 helped our forecasters detect the early stages of severe weather from tornadoes and snow storms to hurricanes, including the busiest hurricane season on record – 2005,” said Mary Kicza, assistant administrator of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service. “NOAA-16′s long life is a credit to the engineers, who built and operated it and the technology that sustained it. Although NOAA-16 is retired, we still operate a dependable, robust fleet of satellites that continue to provide crucial data.”

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Funding now for weather satellite upgrades --- money is coming from other core NOAA ocean missions

Yet despite her ample qualifications and obvious acumen, she may well look back and find that training for her space walk was easier than preparing to take the helm of NOAA. By any estimation, NOAA faces massive challenges, from the sequestration-worsened budget crunch crimping the entire federal government’s ability to carry out its congressional mandates, to the global climate crisis, to fishery management dilemmas threatening one of the nation’s oldest commercial industries.

In no particular order, here are five of the biggest issues facing the incoming NOAA administrator.

Rebalancing the NOAA portfolio

It’s no surprise to anyone that federal agencies have felt the budget pinch in recent years. NOAA is no exception, though its financial circumstance may not be as dire as some other agencies’—at least on the surface. For 2013, NOAA’s topline spending level held relatively steady from fiscal year 2012 at about $4.9 billion. But the distribution of its funding has created difficult circumstances for many of its traditional programs.

In FY 2010, the last year Congress passed an appropriations bill other than a continuing resolution, NOAA’s spending was set at about $4.7 billion, with $3.4 billion going to its core functions of operations, research, and facility maintenance and $1.3 billion supporting procurement and acquisition (in layman’s terms, this means “buying stuff”). More than 90 percent of that acquisition budget—$1.2 billion—was spent on upgrading NOAA’s aging weather satellite systems. Fast forward to the 2013 spend plan, and the operations budget has declined to $3.1 billion, while the acquisitions budget has actually increased to $1.8 billion—$1.7 billion of which funded the purchase and construction of new satellite systems.

While there’s no question that the government desperately needs to upgrade its weather satellite systems, we can’t continue to take this funding away from core missions such as fishery and marine protected species management, ocean observation and monitoring, and pollution response.

Modernizing the National Weather Service

Of course, rebalancing the agency’s priorities doesn’t mean neglecting the critical upgrades and maintenance of services in the National Weather Service and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service—the rather wordy name of NOAA’s office in charge of its space observation operations. Extreme weather events are becoming increasingly frequent, destructive, and costly. In 2011 and 2012 alone, extreme weather events caused $188 billion in damages that disproportionally affected lower- and middle-income Americans.

NOAA has made great strides in hurricane prediction capabilities during the past two decades, particularly when it comes to predicting the path that the storms will follow. In addition to saving lives, these investments have led to real cost reductions. For example, improved landfall forecasting means smaller evacuation zones and evacuation costs roughly equal to $1 million per mile. Similar improvements in hurricane intensity forecasting and tornado predictions could pay similar dividends. In 2012 and 2013 alone, tornados killed 119 people in the South and Midwest, including two massive twisters that claimed 26 lives in Oklahoma on May 19–20. We can and must continue to improve our capacity to save lives and safeguard property.