As Congress Fusses Over Climate Semantics, the U.S. Faces a Weather Satellite Gap

Everyone knows, the development of the Squirrel detector is a much higher priority, so they do not accident bomb those little critters, geez!

Knowing in advance when a disastrous hurricane, storm or tornado is so less critical.

Yes, I am being sarcastic here.

your sarcasm is getting old, really, every comment, WTF...typical politics, all the republicans can hear is climate change, ignorant of the real facts and how this is required, it's not a luxury, before someone starts a rant, i also don't like the democrats

His momma always said, life is like a box of sarcasm, you never know what your gonna git...

Politics = inneficiency

Equation above is sad, but true, kinda like your companie's accountant, the IT department, etc. are PURE overhead, they become a necessity, but it still would be so Ideal to have none of it.

I vote send the satellite.

Actually global warming is just the beginning. Eventually enough long term warming will repeat each year, to cause more of the glacier ice to melt and permafrost frost as well. After all this fresh water dumps into the oceans will slow or stop circulating and then the upper and lower hemispheres will go into a deed deep freeze. It will not be like the movie -The Day After Tomorrow- but it will happen. Add to this the over fishing of the oceans, the acidification of the oceans killing the fish, the added cold climate and major starvation will occur worldwide. I will not see it happen, but it is all likely to happen in the next couple of hundred years. I am very much for Weather Satellites.

Have a nice day!

While we were taking a class to become certified in Symbolic Coder, an energy healing method, we looked out the window and spotted a huge dark storm cloud approaching. Some people wanted to leave before the storm hit.

Then one person mentioned that she had one of Slim Spurling's helical copper rings. She mounted it against the open window and we created an energy vortex in the room. The energy swirled around and then exited the building through the ring. As the storm disappeared, we continued with the class.

Later, when watching the weather report, the weather man said he was most astonished to see the storm veer away from the city and dissipate, contrary to his forecast.

By adjusting the three spheres on the ring, the energy can be made to flow out at an angle. By placing the ring on a rotating turntable, the energy flow spreads out in a circle around the house, causing storms to veer away, leaving nice sunny weather.

Possibly this set up could dissipate the large tornados that we have been experiencing further south.

The problem with trying to track...and say it with me, Climate Change, is that it is..by word structure... changing. It won't only be warming.. it's going to get weird.
The weather will reflect that (as it has been).

That's why we need the weather satellites to tell us little ant-like people here on the surface what on earth is going on with the weather patterns, fronts, depressions, etc. It's not rocket science... it's weather forecasting. It seems to me that you sort of need to know what the climate is doing at the time in order to make an accurate prediction for what the weather on the surface will be like.

The hurricane predictions aren't always on par, neither are any other predictions to be totally honest, but their wouldn't be any sort of guess at them at all if we didn't have the satellites in orbit to feed us on the ground the data.

I think the gov needs to get over itself, we need climate/weather data a lot more than we needed all those dysfunctional F22 raptors that got built for the war machine.. ._. .

How is that hope and change working for you? For every dollar that American Citizens invested in space exploration they got $10 back. Wanda Sykes thinks that a bad investment. She thinks that we got more out of investing in food stamps. She actually has people that watch her TV show. If Barack Hussein Obama (uhn-uhn-uhn) had spent the stimulus money on space exploration, the US would truely be in the middle of an economic recovery. Not some media generated faux recovery. Does anyone that believes in man made global warming understand that words mean things. There is "irrefutable" (look the word up) anthropolical evidence that the Earth has been in a "global" (not regional) trend for at least the last 6,000 years. Why don't you ask Wanda Sykes how many humans were alive on the planet 6,000 years ago. She might know how many cars they had. Maybe they had Chevy Volts. G-d you people are rocket scientist. Maybe you should just run for President with zero experience or qualifications.

"NPP will have a life span of about five years, at which point JPSS should be ready to replace it."

They're requesting $1.06 BILLION this year to replace something that hasn't launched and will only last 5 years? Is it any wonder our government has so much debt?

200M/yr isn't that much considering just how much data these weather/climate satellites actually give.

They're talking that Sandy could cause $1B+ in damage. Now assume we didn't have satellites telling us exactly where she will hit. Even a 20% increase in damage would be that $200M.

Weather/climate monitoring isn't just about the weather man on TV saying it's gonna rain. It's about real life and death decisions that are made based on the data we get from these satellites.

I'm sure the astronauts would email you pictures from orbit if you just asked.

Problem solved.