Hurricane Season Is Here, & Trump’s TACO Approach Means Prediction Satellites Will Continue – CleanTechnica

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA’s) outlook for the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, which continues until November 30, predicts a 30% chance of a near-normal season, a 60% chance of an above-normal season, and a 10% chance of a below-normal season. Never daunted by perilous climate information, the Trump administration earlier this year issued a service change notice: the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) and the Navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) would terminate data collection, processing, and distribution of all DMSP data.

Forecasters rely on various satellite-based tools to monitor tropical cyclones and hurricanes and predict their behavior. Observations of cloud tops and precipitation bands help forecasters see how a storm is moving and spreading. The three satellites targeted for data removal, which are jointly operated by NOAA and the Department of Defense, orbit the poles and use microwave radiation to channel inside a hurricane and illuminate changes in a storm’s structure. This information is critical for accurately predicting the path of storms and detecting hurricane intensification, particularly at night.

With fewer satellite passes over a given part of the ocean, forecasters would see “hours-long delays in the National Hurricane Center recognizing that a storm has begun to strengthen abruptly,” James Franklin, a retired meteorologist who was the previous head of the hurricane team at the National Hurricane Center, told the New York Times.

The loss of the satellite data would be the latest in a string of staffing, funding, and data cuts since the Trump 2.0 took office in January. Hundreds of employees have left the National Weather Service (NWS) since the beginning of the year, forcing some local offices to shutter their doors at night.

Project 2025 called for breaking up and downsizing the NOAA, as explained by social historian Heather Cox Richardson. The Project 2025 authors — a number of whom now serve in the Trump Administration — disparaged NOAA’s six main offices. One of those was the NWS. Together the offices were seen to “form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity.” (Read: the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want any climate change info to affect their profitability.)

Meteorologist Chris Vagasky explains that, “At its most basic, a weather satellite is a high-resolution digital camera in space that takes pictures of clouds in the atmosphere.” The three satellites orbit Earth 14 times per day with special sensor microwave imager/sounder instruments. These let meteorologists look inside the clouds, and, with these instruments, meteorologists can pinpoint the storm’s low-pressure center and identify signs of intensification.

Meteorologists and scientists warned of risks to accurate and timely storm tracking without the satellite information as officials made plans to stop providing it. “Hurricane forecasters will continue to use all available tools, including satellite, radar, weather balloon, and dropsonde data, to monitor the tropics and issue hurricane forecasts,” Vagasky continued. “But the loss of satellite data, along with other cuts to data, funding, and staffing, could ultimately put more lives at risk.”

After much debate, the satellite data termination was delayed until July 31, following a request from the head of NASA’s Earth Science Division.

Since then it’s been quietly revealed that the US Department of Defense will now continue sharing key data collected from the three weather satellites to help forecasters track hurricanes. TACO! (ie. Trump always chickens out!)

What the heck happened?

NOAA staff were to be ordered to stop providing data from satellites that have been helping hurricane forecasters do their jobs for decades. The Department of Government Efficiency cut about 600 staffers from the NWS, yet, after the cuts, the understaffed agency warned that “severe shortages” of meteorologists would hurt weather forecasting.

All five living former directors of the NWS warned in May that the cuts “[leave] the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit…just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes…. Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”

Cuts to the NWS have been blamed for causing inaccurate or late forecasts. The flash floods in central Texas last month, which tragically claimed the lives of at least 135 people, were a stark example.

Why Satellites Are Essential To Hurricane Season Forecasting

Advancements in hurricane forecasting since 1970 have reduced potential damages by $82 billion. Various wind products are available as operational forecasts, reanalysis, and hindcasts. These include the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR), North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR), and Copernicus marine wind products (COP).

The quality of meteorological inputs is always a challenge during hurricanes. Factors like sparse observations, instruments failures during extreme events, and the effect of irregular coastlines on local winds influence hurricane season predictions.

Perhaps you thought that the satellites were being decommissioned. Nope, that wasn’t the case. The Trump Administration decreed that this satellite data would no longer be received, processed or stored. The Navy gently stated that its FNMOC “had planned to phase out the data” as part of modernization efforts. “But after feedback from government partners, officials found a way to meet modernization goals while keeping the data flowing until the sensor fails or the program formally ends in September 2026.”

Precisely locating the center of a hurricane improves forecasts of the storm’s future track. This lets meteorologists produce more accurate hurricane watches, warnings, and evacuations.

“The last-minute reprieve has hurricane forecasters breathing a sigh of relief,” said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections. “Loss of the microwave satellite data would have made it far more likely that timely warnings of dangerous and potentially deadly episodes of hurricane rapid intensification events being delayed by up to 12 hours.”

Just as the three satellites were headed for the trash heap, another is ready to embark on its mission. Sentinel-6B, the US-European satellite launching later this year, will track global changes in Earth’s ocean — height, heat, and movement — with the goal to forecast local extremes like floods and hurricanes. While a host of atmospheric and oceanic characteristics go into hurricane forecasts, the inclusion of sea level data from satellites like Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich and, soon, Sentinel-6B is seen by the Trump Administration as an important addition.

The 2026 NOAA budget request includes an increase in funding for the next-generation geostationary satellite program, so it can be restructured to reuse spare parts from existing geostationary satellites. Stay tuned for more information why the current White House folks want this program in their pocket. Mr. Thiel, a comment about Palantir, please?