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Forecasters Predict East Coast Landfall for Storm U.S. Satellite Plans Falter, Imperiling Data on Storms
(about 7 hours later)
Forecasters said on Friday that there was a 90 percent certainty that Hurricane Sandy would make landfall on the East Coast, but cautioned that it was too early to say where the giant storm would strike or how intense its winds would be when it hit. WASHINGTON — The United States is facing a year or more without crucial satellites that provide invaluable data for predicting storm tracks, a result of years of mismanagement, lack of financing and delays in launching replacements, according to several recent official reviews.
Computer models show potential targets include an area stretching roughly from the Chesapeake Bay to southern New England. The looming gap in satellite coverage, which some experts view as almost certain within the next few years, could result in shaky forecasts about storms like Hurricane Sandy, which is expected to hit the East Coast early next week.
The storm, now moving northwest at about 10 miles per hour, may stay off the coast in the Atlantic Ocean until Monday or Tuesday, but will likely combine with a colder weather system from the west to dump more than one foot of snow — perhaps as much as two feet — in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, and cause strong winds all the way to the Ohio River Valley and eastern Great Lakes region. The endangered satellites fly pole-to-pole orbits and cross the Equator in the afternoon, scanning the entire planet one strip at a time. Along with orbiters on other timetables, they are among the most effective tools used to pin down the paths of major storms about five days ahead.
The storm is also expected to dump as much as 10 inches of rain in the area where it makes landfall and to create a significant storm surge that will lead to flooding throughout a large coastal area, perhaps most seriously in Delaware, forecasters said. All this week, forecasters have been relying on such satellites for almost all the data needed to narrow down what were at first widely divergent computer models of what Hurricane Sandy would do next: hit the coast, or veer away into the open ocean?
“We expect a long-lasting event — two to three days for most people,” said James Franklin, branch chief of the National Hurricane Center in a conference call on Friday. It is, Mr. Franklin said, “a very large system.” Right on schedule, the five-day models began to agree on the likeliest answer. By Friday afternoon, the storm’s center was predicted to approach Delaware on Monday and Tuesday, with powerful winds, torrential rains and dangerous tides ranging over hundreds of miles.
On Friday morning, the hurricane tore through the Bahamas with 100-m.p.h. winds, after killing at least 28 people in the Caribbean. By noon, the system was moving north out of the Bahamas, as a Category 1 storm, with wind speeds of 80 m.p.h., Mr. Franklin said. New York and other states declared emergencies; the Navy ordered ships to sea to avoid damage. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City warned that no matter where or when the storm landed, the city would not escape its effects. And from the Carolinas to New England, public safety officials were urgently advising tens of millions of residents to prepare for the worst, including the possibility of historic flooding, power failures and snow.
The hurricane is likely to turn northeast late Friday or Saturday, roughly parallel to the Carolina coast, forecasters said. Experiments show that without this kind of satellite data, forecasters would have underestimated by half the huge blizzard that hit Washington in 2010.
Coastal areas of the United States, from Florida to North Carolina, were under a tropical storm watch Friday. “We cannot afford to lose any enhancement that allows us to accurately forecast any weather event coming our way,” said Craig J. Craft, commissioner of emergency management for Nassau County on Long Island, where the great hurricane of 1938 killed hundreds. On Thursday, Mr. Craft was seeking more precise forecasts for Sandy and gearing up for possible evacuations of hospitals and nursing homes, as were ordered before Tropical Storm Irene last year. “Without accurate forecasts it is hard to know when to pull that trigger,” he said.
Meteorologists say that while early storm projections can be unreliable, this storm will cause major disruptions in an area larger than Hurricane Irene in 2011, which caused billions of dollars of damage. Experts have grown increasingly alarmed in the past two years because the existing polar satellites are nearing or beyond their life expectancies, and the launch of the next replacement, known as J.P.S.S.-1, has slipped to 2017, probably too late to avoid a coverage gap of at least a year.
“It really could be an extremely significant, historic storm,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami, explaining that conditions are similar to those that created the famous “perfect storm” of 1991. Prodded by lawmakers and auditors, the satellite program’s managers are just beginning to think through alternatives when the gap occurs, but these are unlikely to avoid it.
The chain of events that would make Hurricane Sandy develop into a grave threat to the coast involves a storm system known as a midlatitude trough that is moving across the country from the west. If the systems meet up, as many computer models predict, the storm over land could draw the hurricane in. This summer, three independent reviews of the $13 billion program — by the Commerce Department’s inspector general, the Government Accountability Office, and a team of outside experts — each questioned the cost estimates for the program, criticized managers for not pinning down the designs and called for urgent remedies. The project is run by the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, and NASA.
“Now you’ve got this giant storm complex with a lot of energy,” said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman for the National Hurricane Center. The outside review team, led by A. Thomas Young, an aerospace industry leader, called the management of the program “dysfunctional.”
In New York, officials were preparing for a strong possibility of transit closings, with winds expected to be above the range that would prompt the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to halt some service. In response, top Commerce and NOAA officials on Sept. 18 ordered what they called an urgent restructuring — just the latest overhaul of the troubled program. They streamlined the management, said they would fill major vacancies quickly and demanded immediate reports on how the agency planned to cope with the gap. They have moved quickly to nail down the specific designs of the J.P.S.S.-1’s components, many of them already partly built. And they promised to quickly complete a new independent cost estimate to verify the program’s budget.
The National Weather Service is predicting sustained winds of 40 to 50 miles an hour starting late Monday for the New York region. The transportation authority’s hurricane plan calls for the “orderly shutdown of service before the arrival of sustained winds of 39 mph or higher” in the elevated portions of the subway system and the agency’s railroads. Most of the city’s subway lines contain some outdoor or elevated stretches. Ciaran Clayton, NOAA’s communications director, said in a statement that the agency’s top priority was to provide timely, accurate forecasts to protect the public, and that it would continue to develop and update plans to cover any potential gap.
The authority did not rule out the possibility of shutting down the entire subway system, as it did, for the first time, in advance of Tropical Storm Irene last year. The under secretary of commerce responsible for NOAA, Jane Lubchenco, issued the memorandum ordering the changes. In it, she wrote that the administration had been trying all along to fix “this dysfunctional program that had become a national embarrassment due to chronic management problems.”
Around the city, high school admissions tests scheduled for Sunday were postponed, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg urged New Yorkers to stay out of city parks starting on Sunday, and the Buildings Department ordered all outdoor work at construction sites to halt Saturday evening. “It is a long, sad history,” said Dennis Hartmann, the chairman of a broad review of earth-observing satellite programs released in May by the National Research Council. The report projected a dismal decline in what has been a crown jewel of modern earth and atmospheric science.
In New Jersey, mandatory evacuations are in place for Sunday for several coastal areas, including barrier coastal islands and Delaware Bay communities in Cape May County and in Brigantine. Voluntary evacuations for those areas were being implemented for Friday and Saturday. The Joint Polar Satellite System also includes important sensors for studying the global climate, and these too are at risk.
Such storm combinations have happened before: one that occurred 21 years ago developed into what is now known as the “perfect storm” off the coast of New England. That disaster was memorialized in a 1997 book and a 2000 movie by the same name. But its main satellites are most notable because they put instruments to sense atmospheric moisture, temperature and the like into what is known as the “polar p.m.” orbit, a passage from lower altitude that provides sharp and frequent images of global weather patterns. (Other satellites stare continuously at one part of the globe from farther off, for short-term forecasting.)
“Essentially, all of the major models are now showing some form of phasing event similar to the perfect storm occurring sometime next week,” said William A. Komaromi, a graduate student at the University of Miami who posted an essay online on Thursday comparing Hurricane Sandy to the 1991 event. Polar satellites provide 84 percent of the data used in the main American computer model tracking Hurricane Sandy.
Mr. Feltgen said that “everybody along the U.S. East Coast needs to be paying attention to this right now,” though he added that “we’re not telling people to rush to the grocery stores.” It is a time, he suggested, for watchful waiting. “Let’s not go overboard with this thing,” he said, “but you should at least start becoming aware of it.” For years, as the accuracy of this kind of forecasting has steadily improved, NOAA’s p.m. polar satellites have been a crucial factor, like the center on a basketball team.
Mr. McNoldy said, “You want to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.” Even if the storm’s wind power weakens substantially, as Hurricane Irene showed, “rainfall can still be extremely high.” Mr. McNoldy’s posts on Twitter about Hurricane Sandy now bear the label “frankenstorm.” But all the while, despite many warnings, the coverage gap has grown ever more likely.
The storm is approaching in the middle of preparations for the presidential election on Nov. 6 and could disrupt plans for early voting in some areas, with unpredictable results. Mark McKinnon, a former media strategist for President George W. Bush who went on to found No Labels, a group promoting bipartisanship, said that the hurricane brought to the campaigns something they both dread: uncertainty. The department told Congress this summer that it could not come up with any way to launch J.P.S.S.-1 any sooner. Kathryn D. Sullivan, assistant secretary of commerce, said it would “endeavor to maintain the launch date as much as practicable.”
“Campaigns are all about control,” he said. “So in the closing days, they fear any external events that could disrupt the game plan. Ain’t no leashes for Mother Nature.” The Government Accountability Office, which views a gap as “almost certain,” has been urging NOAA to come up with alternatives, like leaning on other commercial, military or government satellites for helpful data. But it said it would take a long time and more money to get any such jury-rigged system running.
The hurricane has killed at least 11 people in Cuba and damaged thousands of buildings there, according to The Associated Press. At least 16 people have also died in Haiti, and one person in Jamaica. For now, the agency is running on a stopgap bill that allows it to redirect money from other projects to the polar satellites. In approving it, Congress demanded a plan by next week showing how NOAA intended to stay on schedule and within a strict limit — about $900 million a year.

David Chen and Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting.

“NOAA does not have a policy to effect consistent and reliable cost estimates,” the Commerce inspector general said. The outside review team said it could not tell “if the current $12.9 billion is high, low, or exactly correct.”
The program’s problems began a decade ago with an effort to merge military and civilian weather satellites into a single project. After its cost doubled and its schedule slipped five years, that project was sundered by the Obama administration.
As its existing satellites aged and the delays mounted, NOAA finally put a new model named Suomi into orbit a year ago that now helps bridge the gap until the next launchings, in 2017 and in 2022 — two and four years late, respectively.
But there are lingering concerns that technical glitches have shortened Suomi’s useful lifetime, perhaps to just three years. Predicting a satellite’s lifetime is like trying to guess when a light bulb will go out. The most likely timing of a gap in coverage is between 2016 and 2018, according to the best official estimates.
That would “threaten life and property,” the independent review team warned.