Latest news with #DefenseMeteorologicalSatelliteProgram
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Space Force weather satellite deemed ready for forecasts
The Space Force said Thursday its newest weather satellite is now operational and will soon be collecting and sharing key weather data with military planners and operators. The satellite, built by Ball Aerospace, is part of the Space Force's Weather Satellite Follow-on program, or WSF-M. The spacecraft launched more than a year ago and is a first step toward upgrading the service's military weather constellation, which has been on orbit for 60 years. Col. Robert Davis, who leads Space Systems Command's sensing portfolio, said in a statement the satellite's on-orbit testing went more smoothly than the service expected. 'The operational acceptance of the WSF-M satellite is a pivotal milestone in the Space Force's focus on transitioning toward a more affordable, scalable and resilient weather satellite constellation,' Davis said. The Space Force is in the midst of replacing its legacy weather satellite constellation, and WSF-M and its companion program are meant to be a bridge to a future capability. As part of the work, the Space Force is considering a hybrid architecture that would include a mix of smaller, less expensive satellites, commercial systems and government-owned spacecraft. While the service maps out that approach, its current weather satellite capability – the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, or DMSP – is operating past its service life and is projected to start running out of fuel next year. DMSP sensors can measure things like moisture in the atmosphere, cloud cover and precipitation. The Pentagon has been trying for more than 20 years to develop a replacement for DMSP. In the '90s it kicked off the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System. The effort was canceled after repeated cost and schedule breaches. Lawmakers canceled a second attempt, the Defense Weather Satellite System, in 2012 due to mismanagement. The Space Force's current plan for augmenting those sensors while it crafts a long-term strategy is to split the requirements between two programs – WSF-M and the Electro-Optical Weather System, or EWS. The WSF-M satellites will be able to detect wind speeds and tropical storm intensity and determine snow and soil depth. The EWS satellites will use electro-optical infrared sensors to provide visual imagery of cloud cover and forecasting data to inform military missions. The Space Force plans to launch a second WSF-M satellite in 2028. It has already launched an EWS cubesat built by Orion Space Systems and plans to fly two more EWS spacecraft built by General Atomics – one this year and a second in 2027.
Arab News
29-03-2025
- Science
- Arab News
Arctic sea ice hits lowest peak in satellite record, says US agency
Arctic sea ice forms and expands during the dark, frigid northern winter, reaching its seasonal high point in MarchIn recent years, less new ice has formed, and the accumulation of multi-year ice has steadily declinedWASHINGTON: This year's Arctic Sea ice peak is the lowest in the 47-year satellite record, according to data released by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) on Thursday, as the planet continues to swelter under the mounting effects of human-driven climate sea ice forms and expands during the dark, frigid northern winter, reaching its seasonal high point in March. But in recent years, less new ice has formed, and the accumulation of multi-year ice has steadily maximum sea ice level for 2025 was likely reached on March 22, measuring 14.33 million square kilometers (5.53 million square miles) — below the previous low of 14.41 million square kilometers set in 2017.'This new record low is yet another indicator of how Arctic sea ice has fundamentally changed from earlier decades,' said NSIDC senior research scientist Walt Meier in a statement.'But even more importantly than the record low is that this year adds yet another data point to the continuing long-term loss of Arctic sea ice in all seasons.'The Arctic record follows a near-record-low summer minimum in the Antarctic, where seasons are 2025 Antarctic sea ice minimum, reached on March 1, was just 1.98 million square kilometers, tying for the second-lowest annual minimum in the satellite record, alongside 2022 and Arctic and Antarctic sea ice cover — frozen ocean water that floats on the surface — plunged to a record low in mid-February, more than a million square miles below the pre-2010 average. That is an area larger than the entire country of Algeria.'We're going to come into this next summer season with less ice to begin with,' said Linette Boisvert, an ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. 'It doesn't bode well for the future.'US scientists primarily monitor sea ice using satellites from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), which detect Earth's microwave open water and sea ice emit microwave energy differently, the contrast allows sea ice to stand out clearly in satellite imagery — even through cloud cover, which obscures traditional optical data is supplemented with historical records, including early observations from the Nimbus-7 satellite, which operated from 1978 to floating sea ice does not directly raise sea levels, its disappearance sets off a cascade of climate consequences, altering weather patterns, disrupting ocean currents, and threatening ecosystems and human reflective ice gives way to the darker ocean, more solar energy is absorbed rather than reflected back into space, accelerating both ice melt and global Arctic ice is also reshaping geopolitics, opening new shipping lanes and drawing geopolitical interest. Since taking office this year, US President Donald Trump has said his country must control Greenland, a Danish autonomous territory rich in mineral loss of polar ice spells disaster for numerous species, robbing polar bears, seals, and penguins of crucial habitat used for shelter, hunting, and year was the hottest on record, and the trend continues: 2025 began with the warmest January ever recorded, followed by the third-warmest predicts that La Nina weather conditions, which tend to cool global temperatures, are likely to give way to neutral conditions that would persist over the Northern Hemisphere regions are especially vulnerable to global warming, heating several times faster than the global mid-2023, only July 2024 fell below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, raising concerns that the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting long-term warming to 1.5C may be slipping out of reach.
