The Trump administration on Monday announced a delay of one month to a plan to cut forecasters out of an atmospheric satellite data collection program that is seen as crucial for hurricane forecasting.
There has been alarm among scientists about the plan to cut access to the data after it emerged last week in a public notice sent by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
Some scientists had warned the sudden loss of access to the data for Noaa and Nasa experts could set hurricane forecasting “back decades”.
Monday’s delay in the program’s abrupt termination comes after an apparent intervention by a top Nasa official – a sign that the Trump administration’s stance towards science may be receiving meaningful internal pushback.
The data is collected and processed by US Department of Defense satellites and had been due to be suspended on Monday.
It has been unclear why the decision had been made to cut forecasters out, though media reports had suggested it was driven by concerns about cybersecurity, and the new notice on Monday by Noaa describes steps as being taken to “mitigate a significant cybersecurity risk”.
Noaa had insisted last week that the changes would not affect the quality of forecasting and had previously not said anything publicly about cybersecurity.
Scientists use the data for a myriad of key weather and climate purposes, including monitoring the rapidly changing evolution of hurricanes, wildfires and sea ice. Should the satellite program end on 31 July, it would still be unavailable to forecasters during the peak months of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, which runs until 30 November.
In last week’s notice, the agency said that “due to recent service changes” the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) will “discontinue ingest, processing and distribution of all DMSP data no later than June 30, 2025”.
Then on Monday, in a new post Noaa said the cut to DMSP data would be postponed until the end of July after a request for a postponement of the removal by Dr Karen St Germain, Nasa’s earth science division director.
The new notice by Noaa said the US navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC), which sends the data to Noaa, had planned to “decommission the DMSP ingest system in Monterey to mitigate a significant cybersecurity risk to the High-Performance Computing environment.
“However, late on Friday, June 27th, CNMOC (Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command) received a request from Dr Germain with Nasa to postpone the removal and to continue processing and distributing DMSP data through July 31st.
“In response, FNMOC has coordinated with CNMOC and is ready to continue processing the DMSP downloads … An update service advisory will be sent and FNMOC now expects to decommission DMSP processing no later than July 31st.”
The satellites also track changes to the Arctic and Antarctic, and have been tracking changes to polar sea ice for more than 40 years.
On Friday an official at space force, which is part of the Department of Defense, had said the satellites would remain functional.
