> NOAA, which oversees the National Hurricane Center, says the loss of the Defense Department data will not lead to less-accurate hurricane forecasts this year. In a statement, NOAA communications director Kim Doster said, "NOAA's data sources are fully capable of providing a complete suite of cutting-edge data and models that ensure the gold-standard weather forecasting the American people deserve."
Kim Doster is a Trump appointee who worked on Musk’s super pac. Her previous position was as a climate change denial specialist. Pardon my skepticism that we can believe anything she has to say. The Trump administration is a big fan of hiring Iraqi information minister wannabes as their spokespeople.
The congressional decision was to scrap the continued development of the DMSP satellites, not to decommission the existing ones or stop the data sharing arrangement. The DoD confirmed the DMSP is still operating and will continue to do so but the data sharing is what they have now decided to cut off.
It also looks like one of the “next-generation” systems, the JPSS, has been ordered to operate in maintenance mode.
AFAIK, Congress voted in 2015 to terminate the whole DMSP program. There was no mention of continuation of "data sharing" or anything like that, as you suggest. I guess in the DOGE budget cleanup of DoD, terminated programs are really being terminated instead of continuing to operate under the radar.
Regarding JPSS - that article says that new JPSS satellites are scheduled to be launched. I agree that the "minimum mission operations approach" doesn't make much sense if that is the case. My guess is that this is a stupid cost cutting move that will most likely be rolled back after pushback.
