When the dust settled after Hurricane Sandy, the world stood up and applauded the weather forecasts that preceded it for their dead-eye accuracy days in advance of the historic storm.
But in a few years, if another Sandy comes knocking on our door, we might not be so lucky.
Satellites critical to the ability of meteorologists to build accurate long-term forecasts are expected to fail in 2016, while replacements won’t go online until the following year at the earliest. The gap in coverage will mean meteorologists will receive half the data they get now, giving a less clear picture of the globe and imperiling their ability to predict the weather.
Experiments conducted in the wake of Sandy show that without the satellite data, some forecast models would have predicted the storm would travel harmlessly out to sea, rather than take the devastating hard left turn into the coast it did late last month.
"When we deliberately withheld the (data) from our system, very small errors developed in the North Pacific, which then amplified 5 days later to produce a very different environment over the northeast seaboard," said Tony McNally, a researcher at European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, whose forecast model was highly praised after the storm. "The result was that the sudden left turn of Sandy was not predicted at all."
It didn’t have to happen, but it likely will, federal officials say, because cost overruns, bungled management and technical challenges at federal agencies have left an aging satellite fleet with no immediate replacement.
Currently, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration operates a pair of polar orbiting satellites. These satellites circle the Earth from north to south several times a day, gathering key meteorological data from the entirety of the planet, which is then fed into computer models that build forecasts.
During Sandy, Robinson said, the satellites picked up on the key meteorological events developing across North America that allowed Sandy to take its unique left turn into the New Jersey coast. In simulations run without them, errors developed. In some areas the forecast models were blind and those errors cascaded to produce an inaccurate forecast.
"Your models run best when they have a rich source of data. There’s no way to substitute for that rich source of data, plain and simple," said David Robinson, the state climatologist at Rutgers University. "Without (the satellites), we wouldn’t have forecasted Sandy. We wouldn’t have forecasted two November snowstorms. Without that data, you can’t expect (the models) to be as good."
But these satellites are quickly moving toward the end of their lifespan and their replacements, part the forthcoming Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), won’t be launched until 2017, at the earliest. NOAA believes that starting sometime in 2016, there will be at least a year-long period where it will only have one operational polar-orbiting satellite, eliminating 50 percent of the data it currently collects.
In the last year, two federal government assessments, along with a third conducted by a team of outside experts, questioned the program’s $12.9 billion price tag and offered a scathing review of the project’s management, describing it as a bureaucratic logjam that drove up costs and pushed back launch dates.
The outside review team, led by former Lockheed Martin executive A. Thomas Young, called management of the project "dysfunctional," and said the alarming amount of information required by different project managers at each step of the process made it impossible to operate with any efficiency.
"While checks, balances and holding people accountable are important, it appears that the goal of mission/program success was at times forgotten," the review said.
NOAA and NASA are currently in the process of attempting to streamline the program, while at the same time brainstorming contingency plans for the gap in coverage, such as taking in data from other satellites.
"We’re looking at mitigation strategies ... to see what we may be able to do to fill in that gap the best we can," said Louis Uccellini, director of the National Weather Service’s National Center for Environmental Prediction.
However, he acknowledged the gap in satellite data could harm the progress that’s been made in long-term forecasting in recent decades. Just 30 years ago, pinning down the exact track of a storm like Sandy nearly a week in advance may have been all but impossible.
"It is a concern. I think as we’ve improved our forecasts, there’s an expectation that we’re going to hit these (forecasts) more regularly," Uccellini said. "The decision process of emergency management officials is effected by that. People are more likely to make decisions three days out if you have consistency. The forecasters understand it. We feel like we would be taking a significant step back."
And this is assuming there are no further setbacks or hiccups. McNally, of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, worried aloud that not only will the satellite shortage harm forecasting significantly, it exposes global weather prediction to even more dire consequences.
"We have simulated this future scenario in our denial experiments and as expected seen much larger losses of forecast skill," he said. "However, more importantly, a gap in the U.S. (satellite) contribution would leave us extremely vulnerable in the event of a failure in the remaining European satellite. If that happened we would essentially be running our forecasting systems blind over much of the globe."