Gulf Coast Braces for Flooding as Storm System Builds into Possible Tropical Depression
The system has a 40% chance of becoming a tropical depression as it moves west over the Gulf toward southeastern Louisiana on Thursday, the federal agency said. The severity of its impact will depend on how far it travels offshore, where conditions are ripe for a tropical depression, before reaching Louisiana. The tropical weather will affect Alabama and Mississippi as well.
Regardless of whether the system intensifies, heavy downpours could cause flooding, officials warned.
New Orleans is bracing for 3 to 5 inches (8 to 13 centimeters) of rain through Saturday, but some areas could see as much as 10 inches (25 centimeters), especially near the coast, the National Weather Service said.
'While a tropical depression cannot be ruled out near the coast on Thursday, the main focus remains the heavy rain threat,' the agency wrote on X.
Volunteers and local elected officials played music as they shoveled sand into bags to hand out to residents in New Orleans on Wednesday morning at the Dryades YMCA.
'My street flooded just the other day when we got a little bit of rain and so I want to just make sure that I'm proactive,' New Orleans resident Alex Trapps said as he drove away with sandbags in his car.
The looming threat in the southeast comes on the heels of a series of lethal floods this summer. On Monday, flash floods inundated New York City and parts of New Jersey, claiming two lives. And at least 132 people were killed in floodwaters that overwhelmed Texas Hill Country on the Fourth of July.
The system percolating over Florida will be called Dexter if it becomes a named storm. Six weeks into the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, there have been three named tropical storms — Andrea, Barry and Chantal — but no hurricanes.
Chantal made landfall in South Carolina last week, and its remnants caused flooding in North Carolina that killed an 83-year-old woman when her car was swept off a rural road.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association said in May there was a 60% chance that there will be more named storms this hurricane season than there have been in past years on average.
The currently developing weather system is expected to move fully inland by the end of the week.
Southern Louisiana — a region all too familiar with the potentially devastating impacts of flooding — is expected to be hit hardest Thursday and beyond.
Erika Mann, CEO of the Dryades YMCA, said that local elected officials managed to organize the storm supply distribution within a day after the threat intensified.
'We open our doors and help the community when the community is in need,' Mann said.
Some residents who came to get supplies 'jumped out of their cars and they helped. And it just represents what New Orleans is about. We come together in crisis,' Mann said.
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Yomiuri Shimbun
2 days ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
A New Era of Floods Has Arrived. America Isn't Prepared.
Natalie Newman believed she had done everything she could to get ready for Helene. Before the hurricane carved a path of destruction across the Southeast in late September, she assumed it would be like other storms she'd experienced in five years of living in Asheville, North Carolina. So Newman took her usual precautions: packing a go-bag, stocking up on food, moving her car uphill from her apartment on the banks of the Swannanoa River. When Newman's phone buzzed with a flash-flood warning the night before the storm hit, she skimmed the text: 'This is a dangerous and life-threatening situation. Do not attempt to travel unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding or under an evacuation order.' Then the artist returned to the painting she was working on. The river was still at least 20 feet below her second-story apartment, and she hadn't received an evacuation order. If her home was no longer safe, Newman thought, surely officials would tell her to leave. But no order would come before the deadly floodwaters arrived at her door. From last year's disaster in Asheville to this month's catastrophic floods in Central Texas, the world has entered a new era of rainfall supercharged by climate change, rendering existing response plans inadequate. A Washington Post analysis of atmospheric data found a record amount of moisture flowing in the skies over the past year and a half, largely due to rising global temperatures. With so much warm, moist air available as fuel, storms are increasingly able to move water vapor from the oceans to locations hundreds of miles from the coast, triggering flooding for which most inland communities are ill-prepared. 'We're living in a climate that we've never seen, and it keeps throwing us curveballs,' said Kathie Dello, North Carolina's state climatologist. 'How do you plan for the worst thing you've never seen?' To understand why inland regions are so vulnerable to heavy rainfall, The Post compared the response to Helene in western North Carolina with that of Florida's Gulf Coast, where the storm hit first. The investigation, based on analysis of cellphone data and interviews with two dozen meteorologists, disaster experts and storm survivors, revealed how scant flood awareness and a lack of effective warnings led to far fewer evacuations in North Carolina's mountainous western counties. Yet it was in these inland areas that Helene wrought its greatest human toll. At least 78 people in North Carolina died in Helene's floodwaters, according to data from the National Hurricane Center – more than five times the number of people who drowned on the coast. The fact that many North Carolinians remained in harm's way was not the fault of any one person or institution, The Post found. Instead, it resulted from a cascade of decisions all stemming from the mistaken assumption that hurricanes are mainly a coastal threat – an assumption that fails to account for the increasingly destructive power of torrential rain. As Helene bore down on the Gulf Coast, years of investment and experience equipped officials there to take decisive action, issuing mandatory evacuation orders to move people out of risk zones well before landfall. But most counties in western North Carolina – including Buncombe, where Asheville is located – lack the most basic tool: flood evacuation plans. The state's official hurricane guide labels these areas as 'host counties,' places to which coastal evacuees should flee. Though the National Weather Service correctly predicted that the flooding would be deadly, the warnings from local authorities were not forceful or specific enough to sway residents who never imagined a hurricane could hurt them so far from the sea. Evacuation patterns reflected this preparedness gap: Cellphone data provided by researchers at Columbia University and analyzed by The Post shows a 36 percent spike in people leaving affected counties in Florida for areas beyond Helene's path in the four days before the storm hit. In contrast, movement out of the hardest-hit North Carolina counties didn't change much compared with a normal week. By the time Buncombe County made evacuation orders mandatory, deadly flash floods were already underway. This reconstruction of North Carolina's scramble during Helene reveals parallels with Central Texas and holds lessons for other inland areas facing increasingly intense freshwater floods – an oft-overlooked hazard that now accounts for more than half of all tropical-cyclone-related deaths in the United States. Like western North Carolina, the Texas Hill Country is a landscape of winding rivers and steep terrain that can quickly funnel heavy rainfall into a raging torrent. Forecasters had predicted that remnants of Tropical Storm Barry could collide with another storm system to inundate the flood-prone region, but authorities did not call for evacuations in the hardest-hit area, and warnings didn't reach many residents until it was too late for them to flee. Climate and weather experts say both disasters were exacerbated by Earth's rapidly warming atmosphere. The Post's atmospheric analysis shows that the roiling air mass that constituted Helene contained 42 percent more water vapor than any other observed in western North Carolina since 1940 – fueling a storm that obliterated the region's rainfall records. Another plume brought record levels of moisture to Texas during the July 4 floods. If Helene was a wake-up call, experts said, then Texas must be a screaming alarm – prompting more robust flood planning in communities across the country and new efforts to communicate a danger beyond anyone's imagination. 'Any given community can't know if it's going to be the next one that's going to have a flood that is orders of magnitude larger than the largest flood they've known,' said disaster researcher Rachel Hogan Carr, who co-chairs a World Meteorological Organization project aimed at improving flood warnings. 'But we must all know now that we should be prepared.' As Newman's social media feeds filled with news about the Texas floods – which have killed at least 135 people – she thought to herself: 'It's happening all over again.' Seeing homes turned to wreckage and hearing the tearful stories of survivors who said the warnings hadn't been clear, she was jolted back to the morning of Sept. 27, when Helene's floodwaters irrevocably upended her world. Alone in her apartment, Newman stayed awake until about 2 a.m., periodically looking out the window to check the height of the river. Everything still seemed like a typical Asheville storm. Prepared to wake up to power outages and minor flooding, she felt safe going to bed. She woke with a start less than two hours later, her skin tingling with fear. Newman hurried toward the window and peered into the darkness. The river had risen to 12 feet, swallowing the stairs leading down from her apartment. By that point, the Swannanoa was rising by nearly a foot every hour, according to a federally maintained gauge six miles downstream from Newman's apartment complex. Even though no official evacuation order had come, it was clear what she had to do, Newman thought to herself: 'I need to get the f— out right now. A worst-case scenario On Sept. 23, the storm that would become Hurricane Helene was barely more than a swirling disturbance in the Caribbean. But Taylor County Sheriff Wayne Padgett could already tell it would be devastating for his marshy, low-lying county in Florida's Big Bend region. Fueled by record-hot conditions in the Gulf of Mexico, the storm was on a path to rapidly grow into a Category 4 monster capable of delivering unprecedented levels of rain. That evening, Padgett's office posted a Facebook message alerting residents that he planned to declare a countywide mandatory evacuation the following day. 'Please use this time to activate your evacuation plans and be ready to go,' it said. Officials across the state quickly followed suit. By the morning of Sept. 26, 12 hours before Helene made landfall, every oceanfront county along the storm path in Florida – 15 total – had called for mandatory evacuations. Padgett sought to underscore the danger facing those who stayed behind: 'Take a black Magic Marker, write your name, your Social Security number, everything on your arm,' in case first responders needed to identify people's bodies in the aftermath, he said on NBC. Those dire warnings had the intended effect, The Post found. To determine evacuation rates, The Post obtained cellphone mobility data for the 96 counties where at least 20 percent of eligible households applied for federal disaster aid. This allowed The Post to track movements between the worst-hit counties and those beyond the hurricane's path in the four days leading up to Helene's arrival. In Florida's eight most-affected counties, The Post found, roughly 105,000 people left for somewhere outside the storm zone – 38,000 more than during a calm period two weeks earlier. For Taylor County, where Helene ultimately made landfall, outbound movement surged by 78 percent. Though the floodwaters rose as high as 16 feet above ground level, 'high evacuation rates in those areas resulted in no reported storm surge deaths,' according to the National Hurricane Center. But in western North Carolina, travel out of the 16 hardest-hit counties remained flat, suggesting that most residents were hunkering down in the four days before the storm. Buncombe County, where 43 people were killed, saw a modest 12 percent increase in outbound movement. Meteorologists had been warning for days that a band of moisture being pushed into the region ahead of Helene could combine with the hurricane to produce devastating flash floods. 'It's a worst-case scenario,' Weather Service meteorologist Clay Chaney said in a webinar for local officials three days before the storm's arrival. 'This is going to be one for the record books.' The forecasts for Helene would turn out to be extraordinarily accurate. The lead times for flash-flood warnings and other hazard messages were among the longest in recent history, according to an analysis published by the National Hurricane Center this past spring. The Weather Service cannot order evacuations; in both North Carolina and Florida, that power lies with local and county officials. On Sept. 25, Buncombe County declared a state of emergency and closed parks and schools. By the following afternoon, authorities were imploring residents to 'self-evacuate' from areas close to rivers. But they did not make evacuations mandatory. Ryan Cole, the assistant emergency services director for Buncombe County, said the region's winding mountain roads were already messy from days of rain, and officials worried that requiring large numbers of people to move would only create chaos. Instead, local fire departments were deployed to flood-prone neighborhoods to encourage residents to flee. 'Even a mandatory evacuation is still a choice,' Cole said. 'We thought trying to get people to go with stronger words might be more beneficial.' It was an uphill battle, said Anthony Penland, fire chief for the town of Swannanoa, east of Asheville. His crews encouraged evacuations in a riverside mobile home community, where one man, saying he'd been fine in back-to-back hurricanes that struck the region in 2004, insisted he wouldn't be leaving. The firefighters emphasized that forecasts called for flooding worse than what had happened 20 years earlier. 'But nobody knew what 'worse' was,' Penland said. When he came across the viral clip of Padgett telling people to write their Social Security numbers on their arms, Penland marveled at the Florida sheriff's blunt rhetoric. 'I'm not that bold,' he thought to himself. Researchers who specialize in disaster communication say the most effective evacuation warnings are actionable and specific – like Padgett's message telling Taylor County residents where flooding was expected and when they would be required to leave the region. The Florida orders were also compulsory, which can persuade more people to flee a risky area, said Rachel Davidson, who studies evacuation behavior at the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center. In surveys of thousands of hurricane survivors, she has found that inland residents name the absence of a mandatory evacuation order as their top reason for staying put. Yet inland officials are less likely to issue such an order, Davidson found. Even when they do, those living far from a coast are less likely to comply – probably because they don't perceive themselves as being at risk. Overall, inland residents are half as likely to evacuate from a hurricane as their coastal counterparts, Davidson's research shows. These obstacles to inland evacuations help explain why rain and river flooding in inland areas account for a growing proportion of hurricane deaths, experts said. A Post count based on data from the Weather Service found that freshwater flooding has caused 54 percent of all direct hurricane fatalities in the U.S. since 2013 – up from 27 percent between 1963 and 2012. Storm surge 'isn't the biggest killer anymore because people get out of the way,' said John Sokich, a veteran meteorologist and former director of congressional affairs for the Weather Service. 'That just hasn't happened yet inland.' Swept away Newman scrambled down the outdoor stairwell that led from her apartment, climbed over a railing and leaped over the rushing water onto a nearby embankment. On hands and knees, she clambered up the muddy slope to the road above, then ran to the car she'd left parked uphill. She heard the boom and spark of transformers blowing out along power lines, the crash of tree limbs splintered by the gale. She found refuge at a friend's house, where Newman changed into dry clothes and collapsed into a spare bed. Newman woke the next morning to find that a tree had fallen on her silver Toyota, crushing it like a soda can. The neighborhood had lost power, water and phone service. The streets were littered with debris. She went four days without knowing exactly what had happened to her apartment, until she finally found cell reception on top of a mall parking garage. As soon as her phone powered on, the Instagram messages came pouring in. All contained a video clip of a gray building being swept down river, accompanied by the same anxious question: 'Isn't this your home?' The video had been taken the morning of Sept. 27, just hours after Newman fled. Bit by bit, Newman began to piece together the story of what had happened to her apartment complex after she left. She learned from a YouTube video featuring Bonnie McKee, who lived in Newman's building, that police had come driving through the neighborhood around 5 a.m. on Sept. 27, shouting at people to leave. With the help of neighbors, McKee gathered her 1-year-old son, his grandmother and their three dogs, then swam to safety through floodwaters that were more than 20 feet deep. Buncombe County issued a mandatory evacuation order for people living along the Swannanoa about an hour and a half later. Some 12 miles upstream, water was pouring over the spillway at the North Fork Reservoir, suddenly adding to the already swollen river. Meanwhile, in a building at the other end of Newman's complex, two residents were trapped by the rising floodwaters. The pair was last seen standing on the balcony of a top-floor apartment around 11 a.m. Then, bystander videos show, the structure was lifted off its foundations and carried away by the torrent. The residents' bodies were found days later, buried in mud and debris. Newman wonders why the evacuation order wasn't issued earlier, so that her neighbors didn't end up fleeing through the storm – or becoming stranded inside it. 'The mandatory part probably would have hit harder,' she said. 'Maybe more people would have gone.' Inland and unprepared In hindsight, it's easy to question the decisions made in Buncombe and other inland counties, said Davidson, the University of Delaware researcher. But, she added, these regions often lack the planning and resources that allow their coastal counterparts to move thousands of people from risky areas before hurricanes arrive. 'It's not as simple as, once we have the forecast, we just tell people to leave and they leave and then we're done,' Davidson said. Almost all counties near the ocean have tiered systems to help emergency managers decide which regions should be evacuated, Davidson said. When a hurricane is in the forecast, coastal residents from Florida to Maine can enter their address into a 'Know Your Zone' map to determine whether they live in a designated evacuation area. Coastal emergency managers are also able to consult hurricane evacuation studies – in-depth analyses that help counties minimize chaos, prevent traffic jams and ensure that residents have time to safely flee. But North Carolina's study, which was last updated in 2016, does not consider the risks to inland areas. Meanwhile, the majority of North Carolina counties affected by Helene – including Buncombe – have no flood evacuation plan, The Post found in a review of regional reports submitted to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. At least one county opted to defer the development of an evacuation plan because regional disaster coordinators felt western North Carolina 'was not in immediate' need of one. Inland evacuations defy simple blueprints, said Cole, the Buncombe emergency services official – rather than simply moving people away from the coast, officials must direct them away from hard-to-predict flood zones, often over complex terrain. But the lack of planning slowed Buncombe County's response as Helene's deluge became catastrophic in the early hours of Sept. 27. When water poured over the North Fork spillway, officials found that the only maps of areas that could flood belonged to the water utility that runs the reservoir – and they were not clearly labeled, said Lillian Govus, Buncombe County's public information officer. 'We had to sit and pull up a digital map and go road by road comparing so we could say where the evacuation needed to be,' she said. Many in North Carolina are still haunted by last fall's catastrophe. Newman, now 30, finds herself dwelling on the choices she made that week: all those cellphone alerts she didn't take seriously, the way she shook her head at her neighbors who chose to evacuate. At the fire station in Swannanoa, Penland said, his firefighters still discuss the man who refused to flee his mobile home community – wondering, all these months later, if he made it through the storm. Penland himself has become bolder about the way he communicates danger. 'Heed those warnings,' he now urges anyone who will listen. 'Understand the toll it takes on our first responders when they don't know if you survived.' It isn't only North Carolina that must reckon with this new climate reality, said disaster researcher Carr, who also directs the flood risk communication nonprofit Nurture Nature Center. As the planet warms, studies suggest that more and more inland areas could experience rainfall as intense as Helene's – or worse. Helene's aftermath has provided a critical window, Carr added, since research shows that people are most willing to support stronger regulations and preparedness investments in the year following a major disaster. After the storm, Buncombe County began to develop new flood maps so that it would have clear visuals at the ready before the next disaster, Govus said. Researchers at the National Hurricane Center teamed up with FEMA to develop a course for emergency managers on responding to freshwater flooding and other inland hazards. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention prepared to launch a post-disaster health survey that would ask residents about the factors that prevented them from evacuating. But some of these efforts have been hampered by recent cuts to federal budgets and staff, experts said. John Cangialosi, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center, said his team had to cancel some of its inland flood trainings because of limits on traveling to conferences. In April, the CDC abruptly axed its health survey after dismissing thousands of employees, Govus said, forcing Buncombe County to scramble to collect the data on its own. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration programs aimed at improving disaster warnings are in limbo, said Lori Peek, who directs the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, after President Donald Trump proposed eliminating the agency's research office, which funds weather-related social science. 'The thought of people not getting that information – it's so hard to fathom,' Peek said. 'The cost we are going to pay is going to be in deaths and injuries.' NOAA's communications director, Kim Doster, said in an email that the agency was using temporary reassignments and other measures to 'stabilize frontline operations' at the Weather Service, which it oversees. The National Hurricane Center's public affairs director, Maria Torres, said in an email that the center 'is dedicated to its mission, and our dialogue with partners continues and remains unchanged.' Yet as another hurricane season gets underway, many experts are wondering whether officials will be able to communicate the flooding danger this year may bring. In May, the National Weather Service was scrambling to fill more than 150 key vacancies, said Tom Fahy, legislative director for the Weather Service's employees union. As of late June, 1 in 10 forecast offices was missing a warning coordination meteorologist – the staffer responsible for communicating forecasts and developing disaster plans. The Weather Service office near San Antonio – which oversees forecasts for the areas of the Texas Hill Country that flooded this month – is among the largest without anyone serving in that key role. 'Everything … was gone' When the roads to the Swannanoa River finally cleared, a friend offered to take Newman back to her old apartment complex. They arrived to find a wasteland of putrid yellow-brown mud. Only four wooden pillars tilting out of the earth indicated where her home had once stood. In the distance, Newman could see the wreckage of the structure where her neighbors had died. The rest of the buildings in the complex would soon be condemned. 'Everything from the before-times was gone,' she said. 'Like someone had taken their hand and wiped it all away like chalk.' But after days of searching through the debris, a friend spotted a glimmer of color peeking through the mud. It was a print of one of Newman's paintings, sodden and stained but still intact in its plastic sheath. Now the print sits framed in her new home – a testament to what she survived.
Yomiuri Shimbun
6 days ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Gulf Coast Braces for Flooding as Storm System Builds into Possible Tropical Depression
The weather system moving across the Florida Panhandle on Wednesday was showing a greater chance of becoming a tropical depression as it moves toward the northern Gulf Coast, according to the National Hurricane Center. The system has a 40% chance of becoming a tropical depression as it moves west over the Gulf toward southeastern Louisiana on Thursday, the federal agency said. The severity of its impact will depend on how far it travels offshore, where conditions are ripe for a tropical depression, before reaching Louisiana. The tropical weather will affect Alabama and Mississippi as well. Regardless of whether the system intensifies, heavy downpours could cause flooding, officials warned. New Orleans is bracing for 3 to 5 inches (8 to 13 centimeters) of rain through Saturday, but some areas could see as much as 10 inches (25 centimeters), especially near the coast, the National Weather Service said. 'While a tropical depression cannot be ruled out near the coast on Thursday, the main focus remains the heavy rain threat,' the agency wrote on X. Volunteers and local elected officials played music as they shoveled sand into bags to hand out to residents in New Orleans on Wednesday morning at the Dryades YMCA. 'My street flooded just the other day when we got a little bit of rain and so I want to just make sure that I'm proactive,' New Orleans resident Alex Trapps said as he drove away with sandbags in his car. The looming threat in the southeast comes on the heels of a series of lethal floods this summer. On Monday, flash floods inundated New York City and parts of New Jersey, claiming two lives. And at least 132 people were killed in floodwaters that overwhelmed Texas Hill Country on the Fourth of July. The system percolating over Florida will be called Dexter if it becomes a named storm. Six weeks into the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, there have been three named tropical storms — Andrea, Barry and Chantal — but no hurricanes. Chantal made landfall in South Carolina last week, and its remnants caused flooding in North Carolina that killed an 83-year-old woman when her car was swept off a rural road. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association said in May there was a 60% chance that there will be more named storms this hurricane season than there have been in past years on average. The currently developing weather system is expected to move fully inland by the end of the week. Southern Louisiana — a region all too familiar with the potentially devastating impacts of flooding — is expected to be hit hardest Thursday and beyond. Erika Mann, CEO of the Dryades YMCA, said that local elected officials managed to organize the storm supply distribution within a day after the threat intensified. 'We open our doors and help the community when the community is in need,' Mann said. Some residents who came to get supplies 'jumped out of their cars and they helped. And it just represents what New Orleans is about. We come together in crisis,' Mann said.
Japan Today
10-07-2025
- Japan Today
Hurricane forecasters are losing 3 key satellites ahead of peak storm season
By Chris Vagasky About 600 miles off the west coast of Africa, large clusters of thunderstorms begin organizing into tropical storms every hurricane season. They aren't yet in range of Hurricane Hunter flights, so forecasters at the National Hurricane Center rely on weather satellites to peer down on these storms and beam back information about their location, structure and intensity. The satellite data helps meteorologists create weather forecasts that keep planes and ships safe and prepare countries for a potential hurricane landfall. Now, meteorologists are about to lose access to three of those satellites. On June 25, the Trump administration issued a service change notice announcing that the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, DMSP, and the Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center would terminate data collection, processing and distribution of all DMSP data no later than June 30. The data termination was postponed until July 31 following a request from the head of NASA's Earth Science Division. I am a meteorologist who studies lightning in hurricanes and helps train other meteorologists to monitor and forecast tropical cyclones. Here is how meteorologists use the DMSP data and why they are concerned about it going dark. Looking inside the clouds At its most basic, a weather satellite is a high-resolution digital camera in space that takes pictures of clouds in the atmosphere. These are the satellite images you see on most TV weather broadcasts. They let meteorologists see the location and some details of a hurricane's structure, but only during daylight hours. Meteorologists can use infrared satellite data, similar to a thermal imaging camera, at all hours of the day to find the coldest cloud-top temperatures, highlighting areas where the highest wind speeds and rainfall rates are found. But while visible and infrared satellite imagery are valuable tools for hurricane forecasters, they provide only a basic picture of the storm. It's like a doctor diagnosing a patient after a visual exam and checking their temperature. For more accurate diagnoses, meteorologists rely on the DMSP satellites. The three satellites orbit Earth 14 times per day with special sensor microwave imager/sounder instruments, or SSMIS. These let meteorologists look inside the clouds, similar to how an MRI in a hospital looks inside a human body. With these instruments, meteorologists can pinpoint the storm's low-pressure center and identify signs of intensification. Precisely locating the center of a hurricane improves forecasts of the storm's future track. This lets meteorologists produce more accurate hurricane watches, warnings and evacuations. Hurricane track forecasts have improved by up to 75% since 1990. However, forecasting rapid intensification is still difficult, so the ability of DMPS data to identify signs of intensification is important. About 80% of major hurricanes – those with wind speeds of at least 111 mph (179 kilometers per hour) – rapidly intensify at some point, ramping up the risks they pose to people and property on land. Finding out when storms are about to undergo intensification allows meteorologists to warn the public about these dangerous hurricanes. Where are the defense satellites going? NOAA's Office of Satellite and Product Operations described the reason for turning off the flow of data as a need to mitigate 'a significant cybersecurity risk.' The three satellites have already operated for longer than planned. The DMSP satellites were launched between 1999 and 2009 and were designed to last for five years. They have now been operating for more than 15 years. The United States Space Force recently concluded that the DMSP satellites would reach the end of their lives between 2023 and 2026, so the data would likely have gone dark soon. Are there replacements for the DMSP satellites? Three other satellites in orbit – NOAA-20, NOAA-21 and Suomi NPP – have a microwave instrument known as the advanced technology microwave sounder. The advanced technology microwave sounder, or ATMS, can provide data similar to the special sensor microwave imager/sounder, or SSMIS, but at a lower resolution. It provides a more washed-out view that is less useful than the SSMIS for pinpointing a storm's location or estimating its intensity. The U.S. Space Force began using data from a new defense meteorology satellite, ML-1A, in late April 2025. ML-1A is a microwave satellite that will help replace some of the DMSP satellites' capabilities. However, the government hasn't announced whether the ML-1A data will be available to forecasters, including those at the National Hurricane Center. Why are satellite replacements last minute? Satellite programs are planned over many years, even decades, and are very expensive. The current geostationary satellite program launched its first satellite in 2016 with plans to operate until 2038. Development of the planned successor for GOES-R began in 2019. Similarly, plans for replacing the DMSP satellites have been underway since the early 2000s. Delays in developing the satellite instruments and funding cuts caused the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System and Defense Weather Satellite System to be canceled in 2010 and 2012 before any of their satellites could be launched. The 2026 NOAA budget request includes an increase in funding for the next-generation geostationary satellite program, so it can be restructured to reuse spare parts from existing geostationary satellites. The budget also terminates contracts for ocean color, atmospheric composition and advanced lightning mapper instruments. A busy season remains The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, is forecast to be above average, with six to 10 hurricanes. The most active part of the season runs from the middle of August to the middle of October, after the DMSP satellite data is set to be turned off. Hurricane forecasters will continue to use all available tools, including satellite, radar, weather balloon and dropsonde data, to monitor the tropics and issue hurricane forecasts. But the loss of satellite data, along with other cuts to data, funding and staffing, could ultimately put more lives at risk. Chris Vagasky is a meteorologist and Research Program Manager, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. External Link © The Conversation
