Its passage is still close enough to approach many communication and weather satellites though NASA scientists said these would be spared.
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Weather satellites also pick up emergency beacons used by those who venture into remote areas and become stranded, leading to the rescue of nearly 300 people in 2010 alone.
Although tornado forecasting has remarkably improved over the last two decades with advanced forecasting techniques, weather satellites, numerical forecast models and Doppler weather radar, there is much about tornado forecasting that still remains a mystery.
Today, US military weather satellites return daily data on the state of the sea-ice at both poles, but the NSIDC team is keen to retrieve as much information as possible from the early, experimental Nasa Earth-observers.
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But in a greater sense, you have to ask what it is the shuttle, or the space program, I guess, is doing, and it is a variety of things, from weather satellites and improved communications to other technologies.
The underlying problem here is, weather and observation satellites have both a very limited and very broad political constituencies.
India is short of observation stations, weather planes, satellites, climate scientists and modellers.
These satellites help provide better weather coverage and short-range forecasts for Europe and Africa, especially in the case of rapidly developing storms or fog.
If its conclusions are correct, then a solar storm the size of one that was observed in 1859 could potentially kill several weather, telecommunications, and military satellites in less than a year.
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Sea-level fluctuations are monitored, severe weather warnings are issued and long-term weather forecasts are prepared with the help of satellites.
Satellites are used for communication, weather forecasting, navigation, research and reconnaissance.
Unlike conventional rockets that blast off from a pad, air-launched systems similar to the one Mr. Allen wants to put together are designed to deliver a broad range of satellites to space without the constraints of weather or optimal times and locations to try to reach specific orbits.
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As is the case with much severe weather, we simply see more than we did prior to satellites and (in the case of hurricanes) long-range aircraft reconnaissance.
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Satellites for communications, GPS, remote resource sensing, weather forecasting, agribusiness needs.
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And Scotland, unlike the rest of the UK, decided against satellites "because of the difficulty of getting enough clear weather for flyovers", a Scottish government spokeswoman told the BBC.
This is why most improvements in bizjets during the last 40 years have come from outside the industry--electronic engine controls, global-positioning satellites, moving-map displays, downloadable real-time weather, etc.
If there are problems with the warming as measured by weather stations on land, there are also more reliable data from ships and satellites.
"Fortunately, satellites are already designed to deal with a lot of this space weather, " observed one of the report's authors, Keith Ryden, a reader in space engineering at the University of Surrey Space Centre.
"The Earth's hot deserts -- such as the Sahara, the Gobi, the Sonoran and the Lut -- are climatically harsh and so remote that access for routine measurements and maintenance of a weather station is impractical, " said David Mildrexler, lead author of a recent study that used NASA satellites to detect the Earth's hottest surface temperatures.
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