U.S. Department of Defense announced Tuesday it would no longer process and deliver data essential to most hurricane forecasts
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Defense announced it would immediately stop ingesting, processing, and transmitting data essential to most hurricane forecasts.
The announcement was formalized on Tuesday when NOAA distributed a service change notice to all users, including the National Hurricane Center, that by next Monday, June 30th, they would no longer receive real-time microwave data collected aboard three weather satellites jointly run by NOAA and the U.S. Department of Defense.
The permanent discontinuation of data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS) will severely impede and degrade hurricane forecasts for this season and beyond, affecting tens of millions of Americans who live along its hurricane-prone shorelines.
The news on Tuesday sent users across the weather and climate community – including those monitoring changes to sea ice extent in the polar regions – scrambling to understand the rationale behind the abrupt termination. Though not immediately clear why the real-time data was suddenly discontinued, the decision appears to have stemmed from Department of Defense security concerns.
Officials at the National Hurricane Center were also caught off guard by the announcement and are preparing their team for the loss of critical forecast data for the rest of the hurricane season.
Luckily, the EU also has Galileo, and Russia has GLONASS (skeptical about the latter, but it exists).
Nearly every GPS-capable device has access to both of those as well as the US-based GPS.
Yeah, I considered mentioning that there are alternatives, but there was a review just in 2024 by the FCC to see if they were going to continue to allow Galileo to be recieved. And even then I think it’s only two channels.
Which tells me the FCC could determine it illegal and force an update, at least to commercial devices like cell phones.
Take this with a grain of salt, its from memory. I would be happy to have someone verify this.
Yep, that is a very real possibility.
What a fucking world we live in.