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Is this an attempt at controlling the narrative around climate change, in line with the impacts at NOAA and other climate-related government agencies?
Don’t look up!
The timing is just, it's atrocious. Okay, at this very moment, I say we sit tight and assess.
^ I’m pretty sure this is a quote from the movie Don’t Look Up, if that’s why y’all are downvoting this comment
That's what got us here in the first place, maybe stop doing that.
"Sit tight and assess" as used above is probably a reference to the movie "Don't Look Up" from a few years ago, which (heavy-handedly) parodied administrations like Trump I (and which unortunately seem much less like parody in the Trump II era).
To where? Stock market ath and free AI for the masses?
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Yes. Quoting Projct 225:
> Break Up NOAA ... NOAA consists of six main offices ... Together, these 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 U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized. NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.
https://envirodatagov.org/project-2025-national-oceanic-and-...
Tldr: shut down NOAA to suppress climate change evidence, research, and preparedness; outsource to private industry the remaining parts that are considered directly useful for commerce.
Is it any wonder that the CEO of Accuweather Barry Myers was a Trump donor who became a NOAA head administrator appointee in Trump's first term? The appointment fortunately failed. Now they're trying again.
If we survive this, these people will go down in history as monsters.
What if they're the ones who survive and rewrite history
Then they will do everything in their power to pretend that they didn’t drag us into this.
Oh geez that… that is upsetting
No, this was cancelled by congress in 2015 and switched to the JPSS program which is running and active.
No, it's an attempt to strangle NOAA's ability to forecast weather, so that anyone that needs to know the forecast for their livelihood (transportation, fisherman, anyone that is outside) are forced to pay a private corporation for that.
By what I'm sure is a random coincidence, the CEO of Accuweather donated to Trump's campaign.
Accuweather, who also depend on this same USG sensor data for their modeling…
I don’t think anybody wins from this.
See e.g. https://www.accuweather.com/en/press/accuweather-does-not-su...
Are there other countries with similar weather satellites? I imagine China or the EU likely have some of their own. I know the US has been pushing this for free so plenty of nations likely piggy back off the free data. But I imagine larger ones might want their own redundant services to some degree to avoid vulnerability.
If so, they might be benefiting, but that’s about it.
"Since its establishment in 2014, the Copernicus program has received consistent investment from ESA, making it the world’s largest and most advanced open data Earth Observation initiative for climate, disaster, and resource management."[0]
Data from the Copernicus program is available for any citizen or organization worldwide. So a lot of free data will still be accessible.
[0] https://newsletter.terrawatchspace.com/global-earth-observat...
Most of the world looks at the collapse of the Soviet Union, particularly the looting of state institutions by the oligarchs in Russia, as a cautionary tale.
The current US regime looks at it as a roadmap.
>I don't think anybody wins from this...
Take one quick look at any wealth inequality graph over time and "who's winning" will be pretty clear. Someone always wins. This is simply a step at privatizing everything. Straight out of project 2025.
Kagi 2025 noaa. I shouldn't even have to link it. The fact that their entire game was publicly laid out years ago... and still, people act ignorant or are legitimately not paying any attention to politics... We deserve all that this administration will cost us as a collective.
It not being publicly published or furnished to NOAA doesn't mean AccuWeather or other private entities won't get this data.
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SpaceX?
Business as usual there,
SpaceX scores $81.6 million Space Force contract to launch weather satellite
The contract for the mission designated USSF-178 was awarded on June 27 ( 2025 ) by the Space Systems Command and represents SpaceX’s third consecutive win under the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 program.
The mission will carry the Weather System Follow-on – Microwave Space Vehicle 2 (WSF-M2), along with a secondary payload of experimental small satellites called BLAZE-2.
New weather sats going up, just not "free data for taxpayers".
This sounds so cheap that we could have thousands of individuals launch their private constellations.
Do you really need to subsidise this anymore?
If anything brining competition to this space (pun intended) might improve the data quality.
A contract to lift a sat to orbit improves data quality as much as a transport contract to deliver furniture improves a chaise lounge.
Satellites are still tricky and time consuming to build and are an entire other ball of wax than a lift to orbit.
Of course I'm not arguing sats are easy or simple or whatever, but overall cost has and still is dominated by launch cost, by at least an order of magnitude.
A typical weather satellite carries a price tag of $290 million; a spy satellite might cost an additional $100 million
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) asked the aerospace and defense giant to build it at least three, and potentially as many as seven, new next-generation Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) sats. If all options are exercised, the total contract value will reach $2.3 billion.
Bad news for Lockheed Martin: That works out to $324.3 million per satellite.
It's generally agreed that ~ $90 million for a sat launch is less than a third of a ~$300 million per sat build cost.
One decision can have multiple motives.
It's probably not even that sophisticated. It's almost certainly a variant of 'Why are we giving this away for free? We should be making money from this!!!' Not understanding the second-order money losing impacts of it going away is pretty much expected.
I recommend Ambient Weather instead of Accuweather.
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As a non-American who's life has been previously saved by knowing that a typhoon would strike my home this has me wondering how we will be affected. A lot of smaller countries don't have the infrastructure/man power to maintain a space program. To what extent is the rest of the world reliant on this data and what does this mean for us? Will we still have predictions? How does international collaboration on meteorology generally work? Do Europeans/Chinese/Indians/Russians also share data about weather?
The rest of the world needs to club closer together, and quickly. The US is no longer a reliable ally.
It’s no longer a reliable place to live, either.
I've seen this argument a lot, but I don't see people clamoring to leave. I don't think anyone is taking makeshift boats to Cuba from the US, for example.
If you live in the US, are you actively looking to leave?
We are 5 months and 9 days into this Presidency.
Check back in a few more months.
By all means please do and pay for it yourselves.
Heaven forbid the richest nation on earth that steals resources from everyone else contribute to global improvement.
Heaven forbid the rest of the world pays their own share of the bill. We’re not a charity. We treat our own people like shit, don’t expect to be treated better.
When you light a lamp for someone else, it also brightens your path.
Much of the world is already VERY accustomed to the US treating it like shit
Yep.
Also historically happens during wartimes: https://niemanreports.org/press-access-to-satellite-images-i...
Here is what will be denied to NOAA, now and going forward
Defense Department data also allow hurricane forecasters to see
hurricanes as they form, and monitor them in real-time.
For example, hurricane experts can see where the center of a
newly formed storm is, which allows them to figure out as
early as possible what direction it is likely to go, and whether
the storm might hit land. That's important for people in harm's way,
who need as much time as possible to decide whether to evacuate,
and to prepare their homes for wind and water.
> NOAA, which oversees the National Hurricane Center, says the loss of the Defense Department data will not lead to less-accurate hurricane forecasts this year. In a statement, NOAA communications director Kim Doster said, "NOAA's data sources are fully capable of providing a complete suite of cutting-edge data and models that ensure the gold-standard weather forecasting the American people deserve."
Kim Doster is a Trump appointee who worked on Musk’s super pac. Her previous position was as a climate change denial specialist. Pardon my skepticism that we can believe anything she has to say. The Trump administration is a big fan of hiring Iraqi information minister wannabes as their spokespeople.
> Iraqi information minister wannabes
I’ve been thinking about that guy once a week since this administration started.
I wouldn’t really expect a Trump administration spokesperson to put out a statement critical of the Trump administration’s decision.
>The public paid for this data.
Someone should file weekly FOIA requests.
Didn’t they axe everyone who handles FOIA?
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Wow, they'll literally kill American citizens and American citizens will still overwhelmingly vote for them...
The margin wasn't overwhelming. But if you include the number of people who could have done something about it but failed to, yeah, an overwhelming number allowed it to happen. And, as far as I can tell, will continue to.
> it would be ...
lots of ways to fill in that part. iterating the words seems worth the effort. Thinking out loud, there are readers with frame of reference, and movements or politics-in-practice that have frames of reference, in the messaging .. So making a 2x2 square and filling it in.. you can write for the readers and refine, you can align with movements or their spokespersons and refine, all combined with you yourself representing what you are about.
So to complete the exercise.. how many readers of YNews would respond to "that is evil" wording.. how many movements or politics-in-practice would say "that is evil" as part of their outfacing communications.. and how strongly to you, the writer, want to associate the concepts of "that is evil" with respect to other things that you say or think are important.
I write this pedantic screed because this is so, so critical to communicate right now. The narrow rocky valley pass in which to lay an ambush, is completely in place.. the budget strings. Everyone knows that this is raw executive power in action.. it is to be, because I say so, implemented via the purse. I am not sure how much to include those backdrop statements in any impactful messaging though, because "there is no bad news in sales" and popularity or adaption is part of the task.
oh this is great "Weather: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver"
I see 3 possibilities: They're cutting it off to limit bad news about climate change, for political reasons. Or they're trying to set up some private company to sell the same data.
Or (tinfoil hat on) they're going to do something the raw microwave data might expose and so they're trying to keep the microwave data secret.
There's a 4th possibility: This program was cancelled in 2015 and it finally ended.
The replacement is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Polar_Satellite_System
The JPSS is complementary. The replacement for the DMSP satellites are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_System_Follow-on_Micro...
There's no mystery, this is the execution of Project 2025. https://envirodatagov.org/project-2025-annotation/
$10 says they'll discontinue free GPS and make it a paid subscription service too.
Russia, China, Europe have similar systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation#Global_na... It'd be a huge disruption but it's not irreplaceable.
It’s not irreplaceable going forward. It’s irreplaceable for all the non-upgradable devices in the field with GPS only.
With Galileo being interoperable with GPS and more accurate it might not even be that big of a deal.
Well done to the EU for forseeing this eventuality
The US used to significantly limit the accuracy of GPS signal available for civilian use, so that's not exactly hard to foresee.
Is that possible? I thought GPS works by just listening for signals from GPS satellites?
I’m now realizing I know hardly anything about GPS. Like it was made in the 50’s or something? Do we keep sending more GPS satellites into space? Or are there just the original handful?
The basics of it are it's a digital synchronized time signal sent out by a constellation of satellites. Devices listen for at least 3 separate streams of time signals and the. triangulation happens to get a position.
Irrc the satellite signals not encrypted or whatever were randomized to be inaccurate on purpose. This is mitigated these days by using stuff like cell towers - we know exactly where they are. they pick the same signals out and send out corrections to the randomized data which increases accuracy.
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Late 80s, early 90s for civilian use.
There have been several iterations of satellites and systems.
Late 70s:
In February 1978, the first Block I developmental Navstar/GPS satellite launched, with three more Navstar satellites launched by the end of 1978.We're coming at this from different angles.
Probably easiest for the OP just read the Wikipedia article.
Not sure about yourself, I'm coming at it from the angle of the dates the local (Nor'West Australia) ham operators started picking GPS signals from navigation satellites .. that and recording transmissions from the Harold Holt submarine communications base passed the time.
There were off book non US reverse engineered Navstar recievers cobbled together on benches in the mid 80s being trialed as alternatives to LORAN use.
That's a little earlier than your statement of "late 80s".
It'd be documented in, say, Geoscience Australia metadata notes to air surveys of the era.
Of course that'd be a primary source and not wikipedia, nor a wikipedia secondary reference newspaper article.
Early Block I was mostly used for testing.
If you're just concerned with the first satellite launch, ehhhh, sure. As a useable global system it was much later.
"The GPS project was launched in the United States in 1973 to overcome the limitations of previous navigation systems,[15] combining ideas from several predecessors, including classified engineering design studies from the 1960s. The U.S. Department of Defense developed the system, which originally used 24 satellites, for use by the United States military, and became fully operational in 1993. Civilian use was allowed from the 1980s. "
Here's the current list, marked by launch date and Block:
The GPS signal can be encrypted such that only the army can access it. The not encrypted signal can be made less accurate or disabled over specific regions.
Which would be hilarious because one of the primary reasons GPS became generally accessible was because consumer GPS being accurate made it easier and cheaper to stick GPS in absolutely everything the military uses.
Basically trying to deny accurate positioning tends to not help your own forces as much as it being trivial for them to call back to your giant logistics machine with accurate positioning.
It’s already been discontinued by jamming in many places.
Ironically best fit for replacement is Starlink constellation.
IMHO after seeing what Ukraine pulled off in Russia recently - un-jammable gnss is kinda dangerous until drones like Skydio trickle down to the masses.
This is part of Project 2025 to destroy the NOAA. [0]
> Break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
> "fully commercialize" the National Weather Service's forecasting operations.[1]
One of arguments seems to be based on climate change denial
"Together, these [six main offices of NOAS] 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 U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable"
"Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area."
> "Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area."
Absolutely mind-boggling that someone can put that in writing with a straight face.
A lot of very specific things in the original source: https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...
I found this one funny:
Overlap exists between the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Overly simplified, the NMFS handles saltwater species while the Fish and Wildlife Service focuses on fresh water. The goals of these two agencies should be streamlined.
Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area.
What in the actual fuck. I can’t believe they are actually doing all those little petty things.
Genuine - did you think it was exaggerated in the media or that they wouldn't? A lot of people seem to have not taken it seriously around 2023, even though it was a very detailed plan with legal strategies, implementations and bills, etc in there.
A lot of people didn’t take it seriously because the RNC lied about distancing themselves from the Project 2025, which is a meaningless statement that even Democrats believed. It doesn’t really matter if the RNC distances themselves though does it?
They're not just petty, they're wildly impractical.
You can't privatise NOAA and the services it offers. It cannot work at an equivalent level as a private service. Its effectiveness relies on being able to decide what's valuable in purely scientific terms, and those terms don't align with short-term corporate greed.
But if you ask these cranks what NOAA actually does, they'll have no clue. They're not just evil, they're stupid - the smallest, most banal bureaucrats, cosplaying radicals.
They're not trying to privatize NOAA; they're trying to shut it down.
NWS is what they're trying to privatize.
Yes the conflation is my bad because I think this move is relative to NWS privatization, which is what might strike most people. You can’t have the government predicting and tracking major weather events and issues, those are the biggest datasets to sell access too.
For other NOAA fallout effects in the government, a Potus wouldn’t have to rob from the FEMA funds if there’s nothing for FEMA to prepare for, in that FEMA cannot say we need to spend money to help flooding in Texas or hurricane damage in Florida. No cancel that and put that money into the tax break or 1% monetary “business investment” funnel fund. [0] [1]
[0] https://www.project2025.observer/?search=flood
[1] https://www.project2025.observer/?search=Fema&sort=agency-de...
>It cannot work [...] as a private service
But with public contracts it can be a very effective way to line ones pockets with tax payer money.
Yes as warned and ignored.
Literally had this report for years and literally heard the current president praise and endorse it on a hot mic. The fact that, presumably, educated people, are still acting surprised (or worse, legitimately are ignorant) when the reic-i mean presidency was explicitly planned out, in a commissioned by the wealthy, public to all, report by the most connected conservative think tank in the country.
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Such hyperbolic comments!
The DMSP program was discontinued in 2015 by a vote in congress[1]. Virtually every working stallelite in this program has failed. As best as I can tell there's just a single working one specifically NOAA-19[2].
Instead the program has switched to JPSS[3] which is part of GEOSS[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Meteorological_Satelli... (scroll up slightly)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA-19
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Polar_Satellite_System
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Earth_Observation_Syste...
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> "There are cybersecurity concerns. That's what we're being told."
Anyone know what that's about?
> "There are cybersecurity concerns. That's what we're being told."
Let's try to make sense of that.
1) the cybersecurity talent from DoD and USG is so decimated it can't
field a response to whatever this concern is or
2) the DoD has the talent to resolve whatever this concern is and they
are deliberately leaving this concern in place or
3) the DoD is lying about a cybersecurity issue being the reason
that they're withholding lifesaving data (from benefiting
the public that paid for it).Fourth option: a cyber company that could potentially sell weather forecast data is loosing it's financial security because NOAA gives it away for free.
They want to privatize it for private gain and to shut down climate change alarms. It is in Project 2025.
it's sure great we have a blueprint that explains all of this in detail.
Okay and then what? There's already huge issues with getting home insurance in places like Florida, what will they do, force companies to offer it against their will and see them go broke? Convince people that insurance is woke? There are real problems that aren't going away, regardless of their beliefs.
The thinking is they will offer it at a high enough cost that they don't go broke. The problem is a lot of consumers, if not most, would be fine reading street signs or using mapquest.
Blamestorming, fingerpointing, and avoiding saying anything that might make Trump tweet about them in allcaps at 2am.
Are the satellites being turned off, or could people with SDRs pick this up directly from space and offer it up for free?
They're DoD satellites, so encryption is a real possibility.
Yes, many weather satellites broadcast in frequencies accessible to amateur SDR setups (137-138MHz for NOAA polar orbiting satellites), though military weather satellites like DMSP use different frequencies and encryption that make civilian reception significantly more challenging.
saveitforparts actively vlogs about the weather satellite sdr stuff. It's an interesting thing to learn about
“We shouldn’t keep trusting nation-states for meteorology data. They can and will cut off access if the powers that be demand it, even if it hurts billions of others by doing so.” - Me, circa mid-2010s
“You’re overreacting, nobody would be dumb enough to cut off access to data like that. Stop being alarmist.” - Everyone I have shared that thought with since.
Unfortunately, “I Told You So’s” don’t pay my rent, otherwise I’d have a decent home of my own by now. Here’s hoping ESA or JAXA help fill that gap until the UN can take over (an organization ideally suited for global meteorology tasks).
People probably reacted poorly to this because it's hard to disambiguate from "we shouldn't keep trusting nation-states for x [because I'm actively working to profit from providing an alternative]" from "[because I'm worried others will dismantle it despite my best efforts to prevent it]"
Michael Lewis, in the Fifth Risk, has a whole chapter on how during Trump 1 the head of Accuweather was basically trying to shut down free distribution of weather updates from NOAA/National Weather Service.
The reason:
For profit weather companies don't want free government weather updates going out to their potential customers.
PS. Having been on HN for many years and watched the full "disrupt old industries!" cycle, I'm not that surprised this is where we have ended up.
This is example number 7748492 of how the decline of America will be practically irreversible once a political machine with any kind of rational worldview is in charge again. It took a century to build some of the things that are being destroyed in days or weeks. We're looking at the fall of rome. The only question now is whether a dark age follows or whether someone else takes over.
No one agrees to this so why are we accepting this??
Because if you want the data go get it yourself.
O yes every person should launch their own cube sat. Come on.
Its like dump said, they will start nuking the typhoons or whatever that shape is on the radar. Aint nobody got time for analysis
Earlier:
Hurricane Forecasters Lose Crucial Satellite Data, with Serious Implications
so now we get to pay for our weather forecasts twice, once for the military and once for us
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That comment is completely accurate and yet has been flagged.
Good God. The Fall of civilizations episode for the United States will be galactically stupid. The Sumerians: climate change and soil degradation. The Assyrians: external tribes organizing against their brutality. The US: fox news, AM radio, and conspiracy theory uncle Facebook memes.
> "It's not an issue of funding cuts," says Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a federally funded research center in Colorado that has relied on the soon-to-be-terminated Defense Department data **to track sea ice since 1979**. "There are cybersecurity concerns. That's what we're being told."
hmmmmmmmmmm
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>It certainly can’t be as silly as to throw red meat to a base that hates climate data.
Why not? ;(
John Oliver had a whole episode about this
tl;dw: AccuWeather, whos CEO donated to Trump's campaign.
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Even though a majority voted for him, tens of millions did not.
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Vote.
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It has nothing to do with 2025, this program was cancelled in 2015.
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My hunch is that the location of the satellites can be deduced from the weather data. These satellites would be a target in a time of war.
The location of the satellites is public knowledge. Satellites are trivially tracked from the ground - the amateur community does this whenever someone tries to keep the location of one secret: https://www.popsci.com/zuma-spy-satellite-amateur-astronomer...
They also don't exactly move much, it takes precious fuel to change a satellites orbit.
Satellites using sun-synchronous orbits can circle the Earth multiple times in a day.Compared with a stationary observer on the ground,they are moving at a relatively fast speed.Therefore,as long as they delay the release of observational data by a random time period,there won't be this issue.Only geostationary satellites would have this problem.
But a bigger problem comes before the above issue:most of the current human meteorological satellites do not have stealth capabilities.You can see them directly.Perhaps your idea will become a practical problem when satellite stealth technology matures.
This is a translation.
I did not see your comment before I left mine! But yes the second half makes sense.
I do think you might able to deduce the orbit even if the data release is delayed by a random time period. If you’re a foreign adversary that has its own satellites, you can measure the same information from a known orbit. Then one could compare the published data with one’s known dataset to deduce things like the angle from which the data was measured.
Most plausible reason. National security hawks have always been extremely protective of intelligence even when the risk is tiny. Probably some DoD people (or person) wanted to keep it closed and new hawkish leadership let them do it.
Who knows, the Navy hasn't released any statement beyond "cyber security risks" so there's only politics to fill in the blanks.
It seems to be this agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_Numerical_Meteorology_an...
Who recently got a supercomputer system https://www.montereycountynow.com/news/local_news/a-new-supe...
So why does The King get to tweet pictures from our spy satellites then?
Hmm I think I’m wrong. From what I can tell satellites , especially those in LEO can be optically tracked pretty easily
Yeah I was going to say: you can also know where satellites are by looking at them. Obviously we're not publishing weather data from the ones with important natsec equipment onboard.
Crafted by Rajat
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