This week we talk about the NOAA, FEMA, and the SSMIS.

We also discuss Arctic ice, satellite resolution, and automated weather observation stations.

Recommended Book: Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

Transcript

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is a US scientific and regulatory agency that tackles an array of environmental, climatic, and weather-related issues, alongside its responsibilities managing oceanic ecosystems.

So it’s in charge of managing fishing protections and making sure endangered species within US waters are taken care of, but it also does scientific exploration—mapping the ocean, for instance—it monitors atmospheric conditions and keeps tabs on the various cycles that influence global and US water, air, and temperature happenings, and it tracks macro- and micro-scale weather events.

That latter responsibility means NOAA (which is the modern iteration of several other agencies, including the US Environmental Science Services Administration and the US Weather Bureau) also manages the US National Weather Service, which is the sub-agency that sends out hazardous weather statements when there are severe storms or tornadoes or other weather-related events of note in a given area, and which also provides weather forecast information that local experts on the ground use to make their own predictions.

Most of what the National Weather Service puts out is in the public domain, which means anyone can access and use it, free of charge. That’s a pretty big deal, because the data they collect and informational products they distribute, including all those hazardous weather statements, are at times life and death, but they’re also a big part of what makes standard local weather services possible in the US—they help the FAA and other agencies do their jobs, and they help everyday people understand how hot or cold it’s going to be, whether to pack and umbrella for the day, and so on.

To accomplish all this, the NOAA and its sub-agencies make use of a bunch of facilities and other tracking resources to collect, aggregate, and interpret all those data points, crunching them and spitting them back out as something intelligible and useful to their many end-users.

They’ve got weather observation stations across the US, many of them automated surface observing stations, which are exactly what they sound like: automated stations that collect data about sky conditions, wind direction and speed, visibility, present weather conditions, temperature, dew point, and so on—most of these are close to airports, as this information is also vital for figuring out if it’s safe to fly, and if so, what accommodations pilots should be making for the weather and visibility and such—but they also collect data from smaller weather stations scattered across the country, around 11,000 of them, many operated by volunteers under the auspices of an effort called the Cooperative Observer Program that was established in 1890, and that’s paired with another volunteer data-collection effort called the Citizen Weather Observer Program.

There are also weather buoys and weather ships lingering across the surface of the ocean and other bodies of water, tracking additional data like sea surface temperature and wave height at various points. And there are weather balloons which collect additional information about happenings further up in the atmosphere, alongside the many satellites in orbit that capture various sorts of data and beam that data down to those who can make use of it.

Again, all of this data is collected and crunched and then turned into intelligible outputs for your local weather forecasters, but also the people who run airlines and fly planes, the folks out on boats and ships, people who are managing government agencies, scientists who are doing long-term research on all sorts of things, and everyday people who just want to know if it’ll be sunny, how hot it will be, and so on.

There’s one more major client of the NOAA that’s worth noting here, too: the Department of Defense. And that relationship is a big part of what I want to talk about today, because it seems to be at the root of a major curtailing of weather-related data-sharing that was recently announced by the US government, much to the chagrin of the scientific community.

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US President Trump has long voiced his skepticism about the NOAA.

There have been claims that this disdain is the result of the agency having called him out on some bald-faced lies he told about hurricane projections during his first administration, when he reportedly altered an NOAA hurricane impact projection map with a Sharpie to support a misstatement he had previously made about a hurricane impacting Alabama; the hurricane in question was not anticipated to hit Alabama, Trump said it would, and he later altered a map in order to make it look like he was right, when all the data, and all the experts, say otherwise.

Whether that’s true or not, the NOAA later released an unsigned statement seeming to support his false assertion, and it’s generally understood that the agency was forced to make that statement against the will of its staff and leadership by the then-president.

It’s also been posited that Trump doesn’t care for the NOAA because of their connection with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

FEMA became the target of several conspiracy theories on the US political right, which allege that liberal lawmakers, including former President Biden, used it as a sort of piggy bank for their personal projects and priorities; the agency provides funding and on-the-ground support for areas that have been impacted by hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, and other such weather-related disasters, but as immigration became more of a focal point of right-leaning and far-right politics in the US, accusations that the Biden administration was using FEMA funds to help immigrants enter and stay in the US grew; there’s no evidence this is the case, but that’s the nature of conspiracy theories—evidence isn’t necessary when something feels true to a big enough group of people.

In any event, FEMA is now on the chopping block, the second Trump administration has said it could be dissolved as soon as December of 2025, the biggest changes to the agency coming just after the end of this year’s hurricane season, which traditionally ends of November. Trump himself said FEMA would be giving out less money to states recovering from weather disasters, and that a panel he’s appointed will figure out exactly how to restructure or replace the agency.

To be clear, the president cannot kill off FEMA, only Congress can do that, and they have said they intend to reform the agency by making it easier for disaster survivors to access resources and by moving FEMA from its current position under the Department of Homeland Security into its own thing; a big contrast to Trump’s ambitions for the agency, which basically seems to be that FEMA shouldn’t do what it currently does, and the states should mostly or exclusively cover disaster costs and provide post-disaster resources, instead of the federal government helping out.

So Trump seemingly has a thing against these sorts of agencies, has semi-regularly called climate change a hoax, doesn’t seem to have any particular fondness for the idea of the US federal government helping out with local problems, or the local consequences of larger-scale problems like weather disasters, and has acted in a variety of ways to cut funding for science and public service related agencies and efforts across the board.

All of that has been pretty fundamental to his platform since his first administration. And while the scientific community has sounded the alarm about these stances, saying what he’s planning will put a lot of people and infrastructure at risk, and while this data and these resources are fundamental to reducing the damage, both human and otherwise, caused by such disasters, in the US and globally, to some degree, that doesn’t seem to bother this administration, which usually cites cost-cutting as their rationale, but also regularly points at the concept of immigration to justify many of the decisions they make, including some of these ones.

So that’s the context shaping the perception of an announcement made by the NOAA in the latter-half of June 2025 that the agency would no longer be importing, processing, or distributing data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder, or SSMIS system, as of June 30—which was yesterday, if you’re listening to this episode on the day it’s released.

The agency cited recent service changes as their rationale for this cessation, and weather forecasters have been in a tizzy about this, because the SSMIS system is pretty fundamental to what they do, especially when it comes to hurricane forecasting.

The SSMIS is a satellite-based system that passively maps the whole world twice a day from space in very, very high resolution, and in addition to hurricane-tracking and other weather-related tasks, it also allows scientists to monitor sea ice in the Arctic and other such long-term projects.

The NOAA said that this cessation of service would not impact the quality of hurricane forecasting as we step into the beginning weeks of the traditional Atlantic hurricane season, but non-NOAA scientists and other experts, folks who aren’t on the US federal governments’ payroll, basically, have said this would blind them in this regard, and that while they can approximate some of the same forecasting powers using other data, it won’t be the same, and it won’t be nearly as good.

This system is the only one that allows scientists to see inside the clouds as hurricanes deve...