From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: Near-Term Data Gaps in NOAA Weather Satellite

Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Dave Powner, Director,
Information Technology

Note: the original podcast contained an error in the name of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We have corrected the
error and reposted the podcast.  

Related GAO Work: GAO-15-47: Polar Weather Satellites: NOAA Needs To
Prepare for Near-term Data Gaps

Released: January 2015

[ Background Music ]

[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and
information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's January
2015. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's polar
satellites provide critical weather and climate data. As NOAA replaces
aging satellites with new ones, there will likely be gaps in the
satellite data. A team led by Dave Powner, a director in GAO's
Information Technology team, recently looked at NOAA's plans to address
potential gaps. GAO's Sarah Kaczmarek sat down with Dave to talk about
what they found.

[ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] How big of a data gap is your team talking about in
this report?

[ David Powner: ] We added this to the high-risk area in 2013. The data
gap was about a year and a half to four years. Now, with some new data,
we're looking at a data gap that's slightly less than that one year to
four years. And there's different scenarios which the data gap will
occur. Currently, with the one year thinking, we have a satellite that
will reach the end of its useful life at the end of 2016, and we're not
launching the next polar satellite until March of 2017. And there's a
checkout period that basically gets you to about a year where we won't
have coverage with the polar satellites.

[ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] And what would be some of the effects of this type
of gap?

[ David Powner: ] So, polar data is really one of the primary data
sources for our weather forecast—short-term weather forecast. So if you
don't have polar data, it affects our forecast. Probably the key example
is, if you look at superstorm Sandy from several years ago, there was
some models where we took the polar data out of the forecast. And if you
look at what superstorm Sandy forecast, the intensity, the location, and
the timing, it was really spot on. But if you took the polar data out of
that forecast, it actually showed that that storm would have died
hundreds of miles out at sea, and the forecast would have been off, so
that's a prime example of how important this polar data is to our
weather models and forecasts.

[ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] And what's NOAA doing then to try to address this
gap?

[ David Powner: ] So NOAA does have contingency plans in place. They
issued their first contingency plan in October of 2012, and they updated
early in 2014. We've made some recommendations over the years to
strengthen those contingency plans. They now have about 21 options
they're looking at to address the gap, so the plans have been fairly
solid. But what we did in this report is we identified about 40
potential options to address the gap, and really it's, you could look at
in two ways. You can actually shorten the gap by extending the life of
the satellite that's up there, and then you could also have options that
it actually addresses the gap, where we have alternative sources of data
as an option to the polar data. So, what we did is we identified these
40 options and we made some recommendations to NOAA to consider these
additional options, and to really look at the priority options, because
there's certain options that add more to the weather forecast than
others, to the accuracy of the weather forecast, and so you really want
to look at those priority options and pursue those priority options.
Some of those are if you look at aircraft observations, there's ways to
take the global positioning system and use it kind of as a thermometer
in the sky and do some different things with the GPS constellation, and
there's great returns with some of those options. So we made
recommendations to update their contingency plans and to really look at
these priority areas.

[ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] Given the criticalness of this data, what do you
see as the bottom line of this report?

[ David Powner: ] So the bottom line is a gap is highly likely, the
consequences are severe. NOAA has done a fine job with their initial
contingency plans, but they really need to look at the priority options,
those options that add more to the accuracy of the forecast over other
options.

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[ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO.gov and be sure to tune in to the
next episode of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional
watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office.