PHOTO: john macneill

Lone Ranger: Uncertainty clouds the future of QuikSCAT—a vital, but elderly, weather data satellite.

When Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans in August 2005, the floodwaters triggered a cascade of infrastructure failures, resulting in many hundreds of fatalities. How much worse it would have been, however, if the city had not been evacuated at all. The decision to evacuate was based primarily on observations made from a family of satellites that feed data to the National Weather Service’s supercomputers.

“The satellite systems are an enormous scientific powerhouse that saved we don’t know how many people,” says Berrien Moore III, the director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire, Durham.

The degree of precision needed to forecast hurricanes, and the future accuracy of climate modeling as well, may be in danger if recent trends in Earth-observing satellite programs persist, says a survey report published in January by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. According to the report, “Earth Science and Applications From Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond,” the number of instruments now collecting environmental data aboard American satellites will likely decrease by 40 percent within the next three years, if current trends continue. Few replacements are in the works at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in Washington, D.C., the agencies that conduct the bulk of Earth science research from space.

William Gail, a member of the panel that produced the report, puts its central message bluntly: “There’s a train wreck coming.”

Hanging in the balance is the continuity of climate data records, not to mention the measurements needed to predict natural disasters and monitor other aspects of ecosystem health, says Gail, director of strategic development for Microsoft Virtual Earth, in Boulder, Colo.

Moore, who cochaired the academy survey, agrees. Referring to Katrina, he notes that “the combination of satellite observations, mathematical models, and measurements from aircraft nailed a class-five hurricane going into a major American city three days in advance. I just ask you, imagine a world where [all of] those three things are not there.”