For seven decades, each spacecraft in the DMSP has circled Earth about 14 times a day, providing crucial weather data to military and civilian agencies. Here’s what comes next — and why it’s important.
Forecast first
“Every military mission begins with a weather briefing; terrestrial weather, space weather, or both. The data required to generate forecasts for our forces is largely dependent on complex models, and approximately 95 percent of the data that feeds these models comes from space-based sensors or ground-based observatories looking into space.” ~ Air Force testimony to Congress, 2019
Turning to partners
Some future capacity will come from satellites fielded by the U.S. military, but its planners and weather analysts will largely use data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the system operated by the 30-member European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, the Japan Meteorological Agency and others.
Smaller is better
The U.S. Space Force has launched a demonstration program to see if a prototype CubeSat in polar, low Earth orbit can perform functions similar to the DMSP. The program is called EWS, short for Electro-Optical/Infrared Weather Systems. The companies developing the CubeSats are Orion Space Solutions of Colorado and General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems of San Diego.
Oceans and more
The first of two Space Force satellites collecting data on the ocean’s surface and other atmospheric conditions has been placed in polar low Earth orbit. A second is planned to launch soon. These Weather System Follow-on-Microwave satellites, or WSF-M, are built by a U.S. subsidiary of Britain-based BAE Systems to fill what are seen as gaps in the military’s space-based environmental monitoring requirements. These gaps, in order of priority, are:
- Ocean surface vector winds
- Tropical cyclone intensity
- Low Earth orbit charged particle characterization
- Sea ice characterization
- Soil moisture
- Snow depth