The U.S Congress recently cut the budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s aging satellites. That could spell some trouble for meteorologists here in Idaho who rely on these satellites for information.
Some of those satellites include polar orbiters. They continuously circle the planet in a north-south pattern gathering data on everything from atmospheric temperatures to wildfires. “That’s opposed to a geostationary satellites that is in orbit over the equator,” explains Jay Breidenbach. Breidenbach is the head meteorologists with the National Weather Service in Boise. Meteorologists like Breidenbach get information from polar orbiting satellites every day. “Some of that information makes its way into the numerical weather prediction models,” he says. Breidenbach uses those models to predict the weather up to a week ahead of time.“They take all of the information that we have about the atmosphere from weather balloons, surface observations, satellites,” he explains. “What we do is we describe what the atmosphere looks like currently and then the model will take a project what the atmosphere will look like in the future.” 00:22
Breidenbach can issue red flag warnings for smoky skies with help from polar orbiters. He can also predict a week’s worth of potentially severe thunderstorms in say the Sawtooth Range. With summer weather giving way to stormy skies that affect wildfires in the state, information from polar orbiters is important. “During summer months which last all the way to the latter portion of September, Idaho is susceptible to thunderstorm storm activity including dry lightning and wind, ” says Breidenbach.
Because of the budget cuts, officials at NOAA say there could be a gap in weather satellite coverage over the next four years.