Private Weather Satellites Hold Promise, But Perils Too

Any day now President Donald Trump will likely sign a bill that would expand a pilot program to test the promises of for-profit weather data collection. While the program may pave the way for beneficial partnerships, we should be careful not to embrace commercialization too quickly for critical services like weather and climate monitoring.

The Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017 (H.R353) appropriates $6 million each year over the next four years to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to explore the use of commercially-obtained weather satellite data.

The bill, which was first introduced by Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), was approved by voice vote in the house and unanimous consent in the Senate. It went to Trump’s desk April 6, where it currently awaits his signature.

The pilot program is already underway. NOAA last year contracted with two companies, San Francisco-based Spire Global Inc. and GeoOptics Inc. of Pasadena, California to provide supplementary satellite data.

NOAA originally received $3 million for the program. The new legislation doubles that.

The idea, of course, is ultimately to save taxpayers’ money. The cost of launching and operating satellites has come down dramatically in recent years with the advent of lightweight “cube satellites” and the ever-increasing ability to fit more computing power in smaller packages.

Spire Global has already deployed 12 CubeSats into Low Earth Orbit. GeoOptics and other companies are planning to do the same in the coming months.

Given all the hubbub about commercial space flight, it’s no surprise that legislators (and especially fiscal-hawk Republicans) would be eager to cede some of our other space-based activities to the private sector.

Still, it’s much too early to declare the end of government’s weather monopoly.

For one thing, we have no idea how good any of the information from these private entities will be. NOAA has been operating satellites for dozens of years; GeoOptics hasn’t even gotten into orbit yet. A lot is going to depend on the design and management of the technology.

For now, these outside sources will mainly be used to supplement NOAA’s own data. The agency will be required to report on the value of any partnership it enters into within three years.

It’s possible that all the data will be useful for is supplementation.

Then there are the twin issues of profit and propriety. Even if NOAA stopped using its own monitoring systems entirely, we’re going to pay something for this data. Maybe more, since (unlike a public agency) these companies will need to be making a healthy profit off the deal.

More important perhaps is preserving the public’s access to weather data. NOAA has argued free public access is required by the World Meteorological Organization. Fortunately, H.R.353 also backs them up, and the companies appear to be on board as well. Should the program pan out, Congress will need to codify enforcement of this openness.

Even if all the pieces fall into place, it would be folly for NOAA to get out of the satellite development and monitoring business altogether.

Government agencies are almost always the pioneers of big-budget, long-range innovations – the kinds of things that private companies can rarely afford or risk. The technique these satellite companies are now employing, called radio occulation, relies on atmospheric distortions of GPS signals. It was first created by NOAA scientists.

Already NOAA has had trouble getting funding for some of its next-generation monitoring projects. At the same time as the pilot program has been getting underway, Congress and the Trump administration have been dithering on funding the next stage of the COSMIC-2 system, which is expected to increase the current amount of data collected via radio occulation data by an order of magnitude when fully deployed.

It would be myopic to bet on unproven private data while ignoring the bonanza we know can be had from public systems.

We should be cautiously optimistic about the potential of commercial weather satellites, but let’s keep the emphasis on “cautiously.”