The final two years of George W. Bush’s presidency were marked by a major controversy over budget cuts at the National Hurricane Center, a dispute that eventually cost the center’s director his job. But those controversies did not end with the conclusion of the Bush administration. When Republicans retook the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010, they made deep cuts in the President Barack Obama’s 2011 request for the Polar Joint Satellite System, a system of new satellites needed to replace the old ones, which currently provide 85 percent of the data used in hurricane forecasting. House Republicans proposed further deep cuts in the program in fiscal year 2012.
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Marion Blakey, who served as head of the Federal Aviation Administration under President George W. Bush and is now chief executive officer of the Aerospace Industries Association, explained the problem this way: “In one test last year, NOAA ran models forecasting the 2010 Snowmaggedon blizzard using 1960s-era sea buoys and weather balloons. Without satellite data, models misjudged the storm track by 200 to 300 miles and underestimated snowfall accumulations by 10 inches.”
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The across-the-board cuts will eliminate about $182 million from the Polar Joint Satellite System and other NOAA satellite programs in the coming fiscal year, as well as $1.6 billion from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration budget, which provides NOAA with the satellite launch capability. That will, without question, greatly increase the gap in polar satellite coverage, causing us to forecast the strength and path of hurricanes with less than half the amount of information that we have today.
GOP Budget Cuts Would Devastate Hurricane And Weather Forecasting | ThinkProgress
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