Hurricane Forecasters Lose Crucial Satellite Data, with Serious Implications | Hacker News Reader

Hurricane Forecasters Lose Crucial Satellite Data, with Serious Implications

scientificamerican.com

22 pointsperihelions4 comments

It is truly astonishing how much damage a coup of the world’s richest country can do in a short time. Priceless data lost, millions die due to deliberate aid policy decisions, every bad actor in the world emboldened and comforted, nuclear proliferation back.

Access to Defense sat microwave sensors with ability to map structure inside hurricanes closed down with five days notice.

No indication whether this was budget related (end of financial year), repurposing by military, or denied out of political reasoning as it's "environmental" and on the chopping block.

  This view into storm structure comes from sensors onboard Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites. Those data will no longer be taken up, processed and sent out to the National Hurricane Center or other non-Department of Defense users. The exact reasons for the shutoff are unclear but appear to be related to security concerns.

~ the SciAmer article linked

  The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) is a United States Space Force program that provides weather, oceanographic, and solar-terrestrial data for the Department of Defense. It uses polar-orbiting satellites to gather imagery of cloud cover, and the program's data is used for military planning and operations. The program is managed by the Space Force, with on-orbit operations handled by NOAA. All DMSP data will be permanently suspended on June 30, 2025

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Meteorological_Satelli...

NOAA notice: https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/messages/2025/06/MSG_20250625...

According to the article the data is still collected and processed by the same Department of Defense systems, but is no longer shared in the open (presumably because it can show some information about blue forces).

Can someone clarify what the likely concern at those frequencies is?

The sats are designed for earth observation geared towards weather prediction; not just microwave but also multi-spectral bands on a constellation (of unknown number) of polar orbit (orbit time ~hour and twenty minutes or so) platforms.

These would be beefed up modern versions of MODIS and similar sats. This defense source might be a small number of sats that provide "peace time" hurricane coverage by sitting in the one great circle polar orbit track that passes over Florida every time (no precession). The relative sun angle on the ground changes for the sat but microwaves don't care much.

(Note: that's some side brain off the cuff speculation about something else, typically met sats are in Sun-synchronous polar orbits that take a while to pass over the same point of interest again).

It's possible the DoD wants real time high grade weather reports, modelling and predictions under some other great circle track and has sats that can be repositioned.

That aside, there's a wealth of things that can be done with multiband data .. monitoring changes against a normalised base image can turn up all manner of things in a dynamic theatre, changes in croplands can indicate vehicle movements, new and covered over buildings, stuff.

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