The U.S. has a weather satellite problem

: The current fleet of 90 government-funded Earth-observing satellites—used for everything from detecting changes in sea levels to providing the raw data for weather forecasting and storm tracking—is aging, and the number could drop to just 20 by 2020 unless funding for replacing them is increased. We may be about to lose our eyes in the sky even as storm intensities and the need for more accurate predictions seem to be increasing.

Private companies are getting ready to bridge the gap. One of these is GeoMetWatch, a spin-off from Utah State University's Advanced Weather System Foundation, or AWS. It is building a satellite called the Sounding and Tracking Observatory for Regional Meteorology, or STORM, which could not only take the place of today's sats but also might improve on them with new capabilities.

If all goes well, STORM will ride piggyback on an AsiaSat communications satellite that's due for liftoff in 2016. STORM, perched in geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the Earth's surface and drawing power from its host satellite, will gaze down over the Asia-Pacific region with a single telescopic eye. Inside that eye will be three cameras, one imaging in the visible wavelengths and two in the infrared. It's those two infrared cameras, dividing up two swaths of the infrared spectrum between them, that promise to give STORM a capability that no other geosynchronous weather satellite has: hyperspectral sounding.

"Our instrument will be taking about 1800 channels worth of data," GeoMetWatch Chief Development Officer Forrest Fackrell tells PM. Weather satellites now in geosynchronous orbit gather a paltry 18 channels of data.

Each channel of data represents a separate color that the satellite can image, as opposed to the three visible colors that we human can see (red, blue, green, and mixes of the three) through shades of infrared. Looking down at the atmosphere in all 1800 wavelengths will enable STORM to track the movements of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other atmospheric gases, because each gas reflects a unique wavelength of light. The scientists' mathematical modeling takes into account how the density of a given gas changes as a function of altitude, which enables computers on the ground to tease out images from discrete altitudes, building up a 3D picture of the atmosphere.

John Elwell, AWS project manager for STORM, refers to the process as "peeling the onion." The greater the number of colors that a sensor can see, the greater the detail on each atmospheric gas at any given altitude that can be resolved. "The more unique colors that a sensor can see," says Elwell, "the more accurately we can slice the onion into thinner slices."

AWS built this technology years ago for a NASA satellite called Geosynchronous Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer (GIFTS). But budget cuts lead to the cancellation of GIFTS in 2004, before it could fly. "We didn't want to just see it be a hangar queen," AWS Director Scott Jensen tells PM. Now, through STORM, the GIFTS technology is finally getting its ride to orbit.

STORM won't be the first hyperspectral sounder in orbit. But it will but the first to fly in geosynchronous orbit, positioned continuously over a single expanse of the planet. And that will make all the difference, GeoMetWatch CEO David Crain says. "We can continually watch the whole 4D cube—latitude, longitude, and altitude, plus time—of how the whole atmospheric state evolves."

In particular, Crain says, GeoMetWatch wants to watch the cycle of water vapor in the atmosphere—"where the water vapor is being produced, where it's going into clouds." That in turn, will enable meteorologists to track the formation of storms even before they are visible or can be spotted on radar. Such knowledge could help forecasters give more advance warning about the formation of convective thunderstorms—those that produce tornadoes, hail, and other dangerous conditions. Today, we have only minutes of warning about these storms.

"Our ability to predict [storms] longer term has a lot to do with the energy, the winds, and the water vapor that's feeding that storm," Crain says. "If we know that condition before the storm forms, we can make a much better prediction as to how strong that storm's going to be, even before it forms its first cloud." That could provide not only a badly needed supplement to the government-funded weather satellite fleet but also an upgrade to our forecasting ability at a crucial time.

GeoMetWatch plans to launch a total of six STORM satellites, all hosted on geosynchronous communications satellites. So far the U.S. agencies that will need new Earth-observing satellites the most in the coming years—NASA, NOAA, and the Navy among them—are taking a wait-and-see attitude to the services that GeoMetWatch plans to provide. That's why GeoMetWatch's first customers will be Asia-Pacific governments that want to bridge the coverage gaps of their own. The U.S., however, may soon have no choice but to follow Asia's lead.

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