As climate impacts and weather extremes become more destructive, military resources globally have become more involved in responding to and mitigating impacts of stronger storms, flooding and droughts.
Among those resources, US and other nations satellite technology has been particularly critical in forecasting hurricane track and strength.
Pentagon now withdrawing critical data from Hurricane hunters.
Michael Lowery in Eye on the Tropics:
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.
Since hurricanes form and strengthen over the open water where direct observations are scarce or nonexistent, forecasters rely largely on data remotely gathered from satellites. While hurricane hunting airplanes help to close that gap, they’re only available for about 1 in every 3 hurricane forecasts in the Atlantic and virtually none – except for a handful of stronger storm exceptions – in the Pacific.
Traditional weather satellites are helpful, but they don’t allow forecasters to peer beneath the clouds to understand important structural changes that can tip them off to episodes of rapid intensification. At night especially, geosynchronous satellites most familiar to the general public can fail forecasters, often missing important details only seen by visible satellite or critical microwave pictures from polar-orbiting satellites that provide MRI-like scans to forecasters every few hours.
The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program and its constellation of three weather satellites provide roughly half of all microwave satellite scans to forecasters. Those go dark beginning next Monday.
“Their loss is a big deal,” says retired National Hurricane Center branch chief James Franklin, who oversaw all NHC hurricane forecasters until his retirement in 2017. “Without this imagery, there will be increased risk of a ‘sunrise surprise,’ the realization from first-light images that a system had become much better organized overnight, but it wasn’t recognized because structural details are so hard to discern from [infrared satellite].”
War and climate change are existential threats that need to be battled at the same time and often with the same tools, experts say. Their comments come as NATO members gather this week in The Hague to discuss boosting military budgets amid conflicts raging in Ukraine, Gaza and, most recently, Iran.
The meeting is also happening against a backdrop of rising global temperatures, which have increased the threat of more intense and frequent natural disasters, such as wildfires and floods. Catastrophes across Europe have already become so overwhelming that governments have increasingly deployed their armies for relief efforts.
“We can’t tackle these crises separately because the resources are insufficient,” he said. “We have to find ways to deal with them in a combined way.”
NATO and armed forces across the world routinely recognize climate change as a security risk that will touch every aspect of defense over the long term. Water scarcity is contributing to instability in some regions, adding fuel to existing conflicts, according to the United Nations. The melting Arctic is unlocking new maritime routes, spurring a race to control the resources-rich region. Armies are vulnerable to climate change, too, with extreme weather events threatening strategic infrastructure and making military operations harder to plan.
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While Spain is the only NATO country that precisely outlines allocations for disaster relief at home in a defense budget, armies are intervening more and more in weather-related events often made worse by climate change. Europe’s most recent disasters — from floods in Spain to storms in Poland — have seen large military deployments.
“The military are there when they’re not at war,” said Richard Nugee, a former British Army officer. “There’s logic in using the military and it is something that the military are getting better and better at because they’re doing it more.”
Talk about burying your head in the sand
And they’ll definitely blame NOAA for the degradation of hurricane forecasts.