Clouds are the bane of a hurricane forecaster’s existence. Or they were, until about 20 years ago, when forecasters got access to a technology that Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona, told me to think of as cloud X-ray vision: It cuts through the cloud top to help generate a high-resolution, three-dimensional image of what’s happening below.
云是飓风预报员存在的祸根。或者，直到大约20年前，预报员才能使用亚利桑那大学的大气科学家金·伍德（Kim Wood）告诉我，他告诉我将其视为云X射线视觉：它削减了云层以帮助产生以下发生的事情的高分辨率，三维图像。
Known as the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder, or SSMIS, it rides on a series of satellites and allows forecasters to see a storm’s structure, which might otherwise be invisible. The Hurricane Hunter planes that fly into storms can also be used to generate three-dimensional storm images, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is responsible for hurricane forecasting, has only two of those aircraft. They can’t be everywhere at once. With the SSMIS, forecasters had an autonomous, powerful eye in the sky. But now the Department of Defense says it will cease processing and distributing the crucial imagery from this sensor at the end of this month. Losing these views threatens the National Hurricane Center’s ability to see what’s forming, Wood told me.
它被称为特殊的传感器微波成像仪或SSMIS，它骑在一系列卫星上，允许预报员看到风暴的结构，否则这些结构可能是看不见的。飞向风暴的飓风猎人飞机也可以用于产生三维风暴图像，但是负责飓风预测的国家海洋和大气管理部门只有两架飞机。他们不能一次到处。借助SSMI，预报员在天空中具有自主，强大的眼睛。但是现在，国防部表示，它将在本月底停止从该传感器中从该传感器中分发至关重要的图像。伍德告诉我，失去这些观点威胁着国家飓风中心看到什么形成的能力。
For years, the National Hurricane Center has been improving the accuracy of its forecasts, and one short year ago, the United States was better at predicting storms’ tracks than it had ever been. But the Trump administration has been cutting the forecasting staff and budgets. And now these satellite data will be missing too. The U.S. is rapidly losing state-of-the-art hurricane forecasting, just in time for hurricane season’s busiest months.
多年来，国家飓风中心一直在提高其预测的准确性，不久的一年前，美国比以往任何时候都更好地预测风暴的轨道。但是特朗普政府一直在削减预测员工和预算。现在，这些卫星数据也将丢失。美国正迅速失去最先进的飓风预测，正好赶上飓风季节最繁忙的月份。
The data were nice while we had them. After all, no one likes a surprise hurricane. When the sun goes down, convective storms over open ocean often grow stronger, juiced by the changing temperature dynamics. But that’s also when types of storm surveillance that rely on what’s visible are least able to determine what’s going on. Infrared imaging can see in the dark, but the picture is typically low-resolution and grainy, and can obscure key shapes. When the sun comes up, forecasters can suddenly be looking at a fully formed storm eye. Forecasters dread the “sunrise surprise,” which is exactly the sort of thing that the microwave imagery from SSMIS is most helpful in preventing. It gives a clearer picture, even through clouds, and even in the dark.
当我们拥有它们的同时，数据很好。毕竟，没有人喜欢飓风。当太阳下山时，对流大洋往往会变得更强壮，随着温度动态变化而榨汁。但这也是依赖可见的风暴监视类型，无法确定发生了什么。红外成像可以在黑暗中看到，但图片通常是低分辨率且颗粒状的，并且可以掩盖钥匙形状。当太阳升起时，预报员可能会突然看着完全形成的风暴眼。预报员害怕“日出惊喜”，这正是SSMI的微波图像最有帮助的防止。它甚至通过云，甚至在黑暗中都能提供更清晰的图像。
Plus, the technology is vital to picking up on telltale signs of rapid intensification, a phenomenon that has become more common in recent years, most notably with Hurricane Otis in 2023 and Hurricane Milton in 2024. Storms that intensify faster and reach higher peak intensities just before hitting land are a nightmare for forecasting, and climate scientists worry they will become only more common as the planet warms. Research suggests that certain signature formations in a storm could indicate that it may intensify rapidly, Andrew Hazelton, an associate scientist working in hurricane modeling and research at the University of Miami, told me. Those structures are simply easier to see with the SSMIS images.
另外，这项技术对于在近年来变得更加普遍的现象至关重要，这种现象变得越来越普遍，最值得注意的是，在2023年的奥蒂斯飓风和2024年飓风米尔顿。风暴在更快的速度上加剧了较高的峰值，在撞击之前，越来越高的峰值越来越多地成为预测的噩梦，他们的噩梦却变得更加普遍。研究表明，风暴中的某些签名形态可能表明它可能会迅速加剧，安德鲁·海泽尔顿（Andrew Hazelton）是迈阿密大学飓风建模和研究的副科学家告诉我。这些结构很容易使用SSMIS图像看到。
A few other satellites can provide microwave imaging. But, as the meteorologist Michael Lowry has pointed out, their instruments either are orbiting more infrequently or are inferior to the one being discontinued. NOAA suggested to Lowry that its Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder instrument would be able to fill the gap, he wrote. But that suggestion is misleading, Hazelton said: The information from that satellite is so low-resolution that the eye of a hurricane looks like just a few pixels instead of a more detailed image. “It’s really hard to pick out details,” he told me—including the aspects of a storm’s structure that may signal that it could rapidly intensify. Plus, having fewer microwave instruments operating in the sky means fewer snapshots of oceans where hurricanes might form. Without SSMIS, the number of microwave-image glimpses that forecasters get over any given spot will be essentially cut in half, Lowry wrote; many more hours could go by without observations when they’re most needed. (I reached out to NOAA for comment, but the agency redirected me to the Department of Defense.)
其他一些卫星可以提供微波成像。但是，正如气象学家迈克尔·洛瑞（Michael Lowry）指出的那样，他们的工具要么绕很少绕行，要么不如停产的工具。他写道，NOAA向Lowry提出，其先进的技术微波声音仪器将能够填补空白。但是，这一建议是误导的，Hazelton说：该卫星的信息是如此低分辨率，以至于飓风的眼睛看起来就像几个像素，而不是更详细的图像。他告诉我：“真的很难挑选细节。”包括风暴结构的各个方面，这可能表明它可以迅速加剧。另外，在天空中运行的微波仪器较少意味着飓风可能形成的海洋快照较少。洛瑞写道，如果没有SSMI，预测者的微波图像瞥见的数量本质上将被切成一半。在最需要的情况下，如果没有观察，就可以花很多小时的时间。（我与NOAA联系以进行评论，但该机构将我重定向到国防部。）
SSMIS is part of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program; a Navy spokesperson told me the entire satellite program is slated to be discontinued in September 2026. When I asked about previous reports citing cybersecurity concerns as a reason for the closure, the Navy spokesperson responded only that the satellite program is “no longer compliant with Department of the Navy information technology modernization requirements.” In the meantime, the Defense Department will just stop processing and distributing the data it collects. A spokesperson from the U.S. Space Force also told me the satellite system will be replaced by two other satellite systems, the second one of which is slated to be operational in 2027. But that still doesn’t explain why this data stream is being cut off now, more than a year before the satellite program is slated to be decommissioned, Hazelton said. “We need all the microwave data we can get while it’s available.”
SSMIS是国防气象卫星计划的一部分；一位海军发言人告诉我，整个卫星计划都计划在2026年9月中止。当我询问先前的报道以网络安全关注为关闭的原因时，海军发言人只回应了卫星计划“不再符合海军信息技术现代化的现代化要求。”同时，国防部将停止处理和分发收集的数据。来自美国太空部队的发言人还告诉我，卫星系统将被另外两个卫星系统所取代，第二个系统计划于2027年投入运营。但这仍然没有解释该数据流现在被切断的原因，这是为何被切断的，这是在卫星计划被定义被分配前一年多的一年。“我们需要所有可用的微波数据。”
These aren’t the only data forecasters have lost, either: Right now, across the U.S., fewer weather balloons are being launched because of staffing shortages at National Weather Service forecasting offices. Balloons offer insights into how the atmosphere is behaving; data picked up on the West Coast are the East Coast’s business, too, as they’ll predict the weather coming just hours in the future. “We want the complete picture of the state of the atmosphere so that we have a way to then estimate the next step,” Wood said. “Upstream information is often just as critical as information right at the point where the storm might be.”
这些并不是唯一的数据预报员丢失了：目前，由于国家气象服务预测办公室的人员短缺，在美国各地，在美国各地的天气气球都更少。气球提供了有关气氛表现方式的见解。东海岸的数据也是东海岸的业务，因为他们预测将来的天气即将到来。伍德说：“我们想要大气状态的完整图片，以便我们可以估算下一步。”“上游信息通常与在暴风雨可能处的信息一样关键。”
NOAA is losing the experts who can interpret those data, too. And cuts to staff this year already mean that more duties are piled higher on individual people, “which means they may be less able to properly use the data once it comes in,” Wood said. Those cuts extend all the way to the people who work on underlying weather models. Hazelton, for example, was on a team at the National Weather Service where he worked to improve hurricane modeling. In February, he was axed along with some 800 employees who had been recently hired; he’d worked for NOAA as a contract employee for nearly a decade, on Hurricane Hunter missions and improving storm modeling. He was part of the group of fired NOAA employees who were hastily rehired after a judge temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s cuts, and was refired after a subsequent Supreme Court ruling. At the University of Miami, he’s now continuing his work on hurricane models through a federal partnership.
NOAA也失去了可以解释这些数据的专家。伍德说，今年的裁员已经意味着个人对个人的职责增加了更多的职责，“这意味着一旦数据进入，他们可能无法正确使用这些职责。”伍德说。这些削减一直延伸到从事基础天气模型的人们。例如，黑泽尔顿（Hazelton）是国家气象局（National Weather Service）的一个团队，他努力改善飓风建模。2月，他与最近被录用的约800名员工一起被裁定。他曾在NOAA担任合同雇员近十年，从事飓风猎人任务并改善风暴建模。他是一群被解雇的NOAA雇员的成员，这些雇员在法官暂时阻止唐纳德·特朗普总统的裁员后被匆忙重新雇用，并在随后的最高法院裁决后被拒绝。在迈阿密大学，他现在通过联邦合作伙伴关系继续在飓风模型上进行工作。
The latest proposed NOAA budget for 2026, released Monday, aims to remove even more workers, along with whole programs. It zeroes out, for instance, the line item for the entire Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office, a network of federal research centers whose work helps develop new techniques and tools for forecasters and improve weather models. If this budget passes, the forecasts of the near future—three, five, 10 years down the line—will suffer too, Hazelton said.
周一发布的最新提议的2026年NOAA预算旨在消除更多的工人以及整个计划。例如，它将整个海洋和大气研究办公室的订单项归零，该研究办公室是联邦研究中心网络的网络，其工作有助于开发新技术和工具，以预测者并改善天气模型。Hazelton说，如果预算通过，那么不久的将来的预测（五年，十年）也将受到损失。
This year has been a miserable cascade of losses for the American hurricane-safety apparatus. Any one of these losses might have been papered over by other parts of the system. But now it’s just losing too many components for that. As James Franklin, the former chief of the National Hurricane Center’s hurricane-specialist unit, put it in a post on Substack, “Resiliency is being stripped away, piece by piece.” What’s easy to see coming now are the possible consequences: at best, a needless evacuation. But just as easily: a rushed evacuation, a surprise landfall, a flattened house.
今年是美国飓风安全装置的惨败。这些损失中的任何一个都可能已被系统的其他部分纸化。但是现在，这只是失去了太多的组件。正如国家飓风中心飓风特征主义部门的前负责人詹姆斯·富兰克林（James Franklin）在替代方面所说的那样，“弹性被剥夺了，一件零工。”现在很容易看到的是可能的后果：充其量是不必要的疏散。但同样容易：匆忙的疏散，一个令人惊讶的登陆，一个扁平的房子。
