US needs long-term strategy for climate satellite program, says GAO

Early this year the White House announced a major restructuring of the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) and the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series (GOES-R) after a decade of delays, cost overruns, and general mismanagement that brought the program to the brink of extinction.

The NPOESS is a multi-instrument series of satellites, jointly developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US Department of Defense (DOD), and NASA, that was initially designed to circle Earth every 100 minutes, providing global coverage of environmental conditions and collecting, disseminating, and processing data about Earth’s weather, atmosphere, oceans, land, and near-space environment for about US$6.9 billion. But a review in 2006 eliminated instruments and satellites from the program, which reduced its capability and could leave years-long gaps in climate data once existing US satellites expire, while raising the price tag to US$14 billion."Without a strategy for continuing environmental measurements over the coming decades and a means for implementing it, agencies will continue to independently pursue their immediate priorities on an ad hoc basis, the economic benefits of a coordinated approach to investments in earth observation may be lost, and our nation’s ability to understand climate change may be limited,” says a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report commissioned to provide recommendations to get NPOESS and GOES-R back on track, and to see if their original specifications can be restored.

A well-known problem

For more than a decade, federal agencies and the climate community have clamored for a national interagency strategy to coordinate agency priorities, budgets, and schedules for environmental satellite observations over the long term—and the governance structure to implement that strategy.

The GAO report recommends including a firm deadline for the completion and release of three key reports on environmental observations: the US Group on Earth Observations (USGEO) report on near-term priorities and opportunities in Earth observations, called the Strategic Assessment Report; the National Space Weather Program ‘s (NSWP’s) report on how to address the loss of the Advanced Composition Explorer capabilities; and the NSWP’s report on how to address the space weather capabilities that were removed from the NPOESS program in 2006.

Moreover, the GAO recommends that the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) should treat USGEO as the unit to plan long-term interagency strategy regarding environmental observations, including any required budget, and the NSWP Council to establish a similar long-term interagency strategy for space weather observations.

All the main recommendations are expected to be implemented by OSTP over the coming months.

Paul Guinnessy