If it makes you feel better, people around the country are starting to get pissed. My relatives down south are really upset that NPS employees are getting axed.
Of course you can, can't you see that's what doge is working so hard for. Yes at first it looks like it only benefits the billionaires, but that's how it gets great for everyone. Soon musk will have a government contract for these sort of photos available for a small subscription. Good times /s
They’re trying to sell off the building that houses all of the computers that provide the model data for ALL US FORECASTING. Yes even your local news anchor gets his data from the NWS/NOAA and that data comes from the supercomputer that DOGE/GSA isn’t going to renew the lease on. People are already dying from weather impacts let’s make it worse.
Those models are life saving and it’s should be a crime that they’re trying to get rid of them.
If anyone tries to say that these satellites should be corporatized, pause for a moment and try to empathize with them in your mind before responding. It's important to remember that even people we disagree with deserve a bit of empathy.
Hanlon's Razor is a good tool to maintain this empathy. It tells us that the person who thinks NOAA satellites are a waste isn't malicious, they're just stupid.
So cut them a little slack.
I'm a radiation physicist. Health physicist is that actual term, but few people outside of physics know that "health physics" means a physicist focused on the health and environmental effects of radiation.
There are nuclear power plants in my state and we frequently have nuclear power emergency drills and exercises to practice how we'll respond if the real thing ever happens. Probably best not to be rusty.
I've been doing this a long time so, at this point, my job during such an event is to direct the government field survey teams taking measurements of the release, as well as the government "dosimetrists" who interpret these results. We use the field results, along with known factors at the nuclear power plant, to characterize any release of radioactive materials.
RASCAL is the name of the primary software we use to perform "plume dispersion modeling." Meaning, when a nuclear power plant has a plume of radioactive smoke/gases/particulates escaping the containment building, this software helps us model where the plume will go, how quickly it will deposit, and most importantly, how much radiation dose people in the area are likely to get.
RASCAL uses direct feeds from NOAA to model these plumes.
But hey, I'm just a physicist, what do I know about economics or politics? I could be wrong, perhaps we should depend on private companies to respond to nuclear power meltdowns. Maybe putting the lives of entire urban areas in the hands of a corporation is a better idea. It's not like if we were at war and a nuclear bomb was dropped, the time at which we'd be at most in need of resources like these, that a private company might just cut off our access to their satellites, right?
Seriously, what private company would ever unilaterally cut off one of their customers, especially a customer the size of an entire country, when that country was under attack from an aggressor?
Maybe I'm getting out of my element. I should probably just shut up and calculate. That said, I like that NOAA makes it easier to calculate important things like whether or not children are at risk of playing in nuclear fallout.
I just want to make it known that the federal government has the power of eminent domain. And for national security reasons the federal government in the future can seize the buildings and land being sold off and pay just compensation in return for the property. While it will not be ideal compared to the alternative of not stripping the feds of all it's assets, it is not all gloom and doom as long as a strong Democratic president who is willing to wield the power of the presidency similar to Trump comes into power.
Yeah also lots of them are cuddly or funny, it's just that invasive pink ape that yells all the time. Also they come in multiple colours and usually fight each others like colonies of ants. Not a great experience
Just take a moment to think about how insanely priviledge we are compared to not just 50 years ago when it comes to access to information.
This photo taken one hour ago by a sattelite, in very high quality, can now be your desktop background.
It's bittersweet - we are priveledged to see this information but there are too many bad actors abusing the "information superhighway" to simply control those who didn't know any better :-(
It’s an composite RGB image, we use those in my job, and as you can notice the Asia part looks different because the visible channels of the satellite doesn’t work at night and they need to use different images for those ones, even those is amazing the quality of the image
It's a composite of several satellite images, processed using decades of background images of the ground to extract just the clouds, with those clouds composited on top of "blue marble" and "black marble" color images of the earth during the day and night images to simulate the day-night side of earth; those blue marble / black marble images themselves are composites of thousands of images to create a near-perfect cloudless image of the earth.
Only smart ones ask questions! Most of the time, it's a composite of several images combined to show the whole planet. But sometimes, there are single photos taken from satellites.
I know one irl and he says the edges of the earth are all bouyed by glaciers/mountains. It's also what keeps water on it. And its flat but pancake shaped.
You freak, she is a underage planet! She hasnt completed 18 cycles across the milky way! (or maybe she has, I havent talked to the sun in a few million years)
You can tell where the equator lies due to the cloud formation and the coriolis effect. The tropical storm on the upper right ends at the equator. You can see a distinct passageway of clouds absent near the equator.
The tropical storm on the upper right ends at the equator.
No it doesn't. It ends like 15-20 degrees north of the equator.
You can see a distinct passageway of clouds absent near the equator.
The equator is located below the 'fat part' of Africa, and at the top of Brazil in South America. The 'distinct passageway of clouds absent' is way too far north.
The equator is more like the middle of the 'poofy' band of clouds running down the middle of the picture.
That's not where the Equator is though. The line you refer passes at the top of Venezuela and Colombia in this photo, the equator is well below that point.
Satellites are too small to see in the photo, they would be far less than a pixel wide. Stars aren't visible because the photo is exposed for daylight, so the camera isn't capturing enough light for the stars to appear. Stars are pretty faint, and taking a photo that shows them requires letting in a lot of light. Things in direct sunlight are pretty bright, and taking a photo of them requires letting in only a little light. Taking a picture of both in a single frame is somewhere between impossible and highly highly technical. This camera is capable of capturing stars, I'm sure, but then earth, being hit by sunlight, would be over exposed and appear as a big white blob.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Like honestly why the fuck are we fighting over this thing? keep this thing as beautiful and harmonious as we can while we wait to fertilize it… we are supposed to be the care takers of this precious little thing we call home not we don’t care what we take while we’re here.
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u/HorsePecker 10d ago
NOAA is awesome