Eastern US and Atlantic Ocean weather satellite not functioning.. Atlantic Ocean has been experiencing a lot of noise and technical issues

Earthquake?

It is September 25th after all...


- Sara

Bottom line:

The GOES 13 satellite is on “standby” as NASA is trying to fix the “noise” the satellite has been experiencing since September 12, 2012. As of now, it is unknown as to how long GOES 13 will be out. Fortunately, the tropics have been relatively quiet across the Atlantic, but activity could increase towards October. GOES 13 satellite not only takes images of our skies, but it also collects atmospheric data that is used in our weather models. With the GOES 13 down, that important data could degrade our weather models accuracy in weather prediction. For now, we must rely on polar orbiting satellites to fill in the gaps, but the data resolution will be degraded.

Rapid decline in U.S. satellites could be costly

Key Weather Satellite Goes Offline, May Affect Forecasts..


In the midst of the very active North Atlantic hurricane season, the main weather satellite scientists use for keeping tabs on the weather across eastern North America and the Atlantic Ocean has gone offline. The outage began late on Sept. 23, after a period when the satellite, known as GOES-13, had been experience increasing vibrations, or “noise,” in particular instruments that was degrading its performance. According to the Capital Weather Gang blog, the satellite was put in stand-by mode while engineers work to fix the problem from the ground.


The outage of this geostationary satellite — so named because the satellite stays in a fixed orbit above the equator — does not mean that forecasters are flying blind, and have lost all of their imagery sources for the Atlantic and East Coast, however.

At first, NOAA placed a satellite that covers the West Coast — known as GOES-15, into “Full Disk Scan” mode, which will allow it to take pictures of eastern areas once every half hour. According to a post on the University of Wisconsin’s satellite blog, polar-orbiting satellites can also make up for some of the lost imaging capability, but they cannot take images of the North Atlantic and eastern U.S. as frequently as the GOES-13 satellite did.

[link to www.climatecentral.org]