Stupid question but are the satellite down links encrypted or no? If not, why not just receive the data directly from the satellites?

Honestly, not robustly enough yet. I've already been hitting timeouts on NWS gridpoint forecasts.

Right now some weather failures don't stop the rest of the assessment loop. Successful fetches get persisted so the system builds historical weather context over time.

The webhook idea is interesting. The monitoring loop is already separated from the web layer, so publishing to external consumers would be a natural extension.