ShareThisOne of the eyes in the sky relied on by hurricane forecasters to predict the dangerous storms' path is expected to go blind in 2016.
The resulting data gap could get longer unless Congress increases funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's polar-orbiting satellite program to launch a replacement satellite, NOAA officials warn.
Hurricane forecasters use other satellites to track storms from space, but polar orbiters have their advantages.
Their data enable the National Hurricane Center to make accurate track predictions two or more days from landfall, information that is crucial to emergency managers weighing evacuation.
"It is very important and I do think people should be concerned," said Ajay Mehta, NOAA's deputy program director for its Joint Polar Satellite System.
NOAA launched the current polar orbiter in February 2009. It is expected to operate until late 2012.
To replace it, NOAA plans to launch a new and improved polar orbiter in October would operate through 2016, with no satellite ready to replace it.
The data gap first developed last year, when Congress appropriated $470 million of NOAA's $1 billion request for funding in 2011. That wasn't enough money to keep the 2016 replacement satellite launch on track, Mehta said.
If NOAA gets its full $1.1 billion request this year, the satellite is expected to launch in 2016 but wouldn't be available for 18 months because of testing requirements.
Without full funding for the polar-orbiting satellite program, the launch date would slip further and lengthen the data gap, Mehta said.
In July, the House subcommittee that oversees NOAA's budget approved a bill giving the program $901 million, about $169 million short of NOAA's full request.
Without the view from a polar orbiter, NOAA has two geostationary satellites that monitor hurricanes by hovering over the same spot at the planet's equator, 22,000 miles above Earth. They're the ones that send back pictures from space of hurricanes spinning in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
Polar orbiters are more valuable to forecasters. First, they are closer to Earth. That means they can send back better pictures of a storm. Beyond that, the orbiters carry an array of sensors that can see into the storm and give forecasters a view of the storm's structure as the satellite passes over it, about every 100 minutes.
The National Hurricane Center isn't sure what the loss of the polar-orbiter data will mean to forecasts because it has never been studied, spokesman Dennis Feltgen said.
"It is reasonable to believe that some degradation to track forecasts might occur in the accuracy of NOAA's longer-range weather forecasting, most notably our hurricane track prediction two days out and beyond," Feltgen said. "However it would vary quite a bit from case-to-case and we don't know how much degradation there would be."
(Contact Eric Staats of the Naples Daily News in Florida at estaats(at)naplesnews.com.)
