Stormy weather: DoD faces dearth of data from planned NOAA cuts

WASHINGTON — Planned Trump administration cuts to satellite programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are likely to have negative knock-on effects to the Defense Department’s weather prediction capabilities, according to government and military officials.

All the military services frequently draw on space-based weather data, as well as prediction models and services, provided by NOAA and other outside sources to plan operations and exercises — as the Space Force owns and operates only a handful of military weather satellites.

“The USSF relies on a Family-of-Systems framework encompassing NOAA, NASA, as well as our International Partners to deliver the DoD’s weather requirements. USSF especially relies on NOAA, and impacts to NOAA’s capabilities do have impacts on the DoD,” a Space Force spokesperson said.

A senior NOAA official was even more emphatic, telling Breaking Defense, “DoD could not do their mission without NOAA services, period.”

NOAA’s fiscal 2026 budget request includes significant cuts. Further, the president’s FY26 “passback” document for NOAA, drafted by the Office of Management and Budget and obtained by Breaking Defense, would dramatically down-scope a key weather satellite program.

As first reported by CNN, OMB would in effect kill the current iteration of NOAA’s GeoXO constellation designed to replace the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES).

Instead, the passback calls for a replacement program with fewer, less sophisticated satellites at half the GeoXO’s original planned cost of almost $20 billion over 30 years. Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for building the GeoXO birds, under a June 2024 contract worth $2.27 billion. Besides downsizing the buy, OMB’s passback also instructs NOAA to convert Lockheed Martin’s contracts from cost-plus to firm-fixed price.

“Lockheed Martin is already implementing a streamlined approach to program execution and working with NASA and NOAA to drive significant cost savings, optimize efficiency and align with the administration’s plans for our nation’s weather monitoring and safety capabilities. Lockheed Martin is open to and continues to offer a variety of contracting options to meet the evolving needs of our customers,” a spokesperson for the firm told Breaking Defense. 

The change would also include cancellation of some $800 million in contracts with BAE Systems for two specialized sensors. Neither the White House nor BAE responded to a request for comment by press time.

And while previous reports had focused on the potential impact of the GeoXO overhaul to civilian weather forecasting and, for example, hurricane prediction, these and other NOAA birds supply capabilities deeply woven into how the military assesses the weather for its own ends.

The Pentagon’s Own Sats

At the moment, the Space Force owns three Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites that are almost at the end of their on-orbit lifespans, and one Weather System Follow-on – Microwave (WSF-M) satellite that came online in April.

WSF-M, which uses passive microwave imaging radiometry to monitor weather patterns over the oceans, is part of a two-pronged effort to replace DMSP. A second WSF-M satellite is slated to launch next year.

For the second prong, Col. Dane Bannach, commander of Space Systems Command’s Space System Delta 810 responsible for space-based sensing and targeting, told Breaking Defense that a first prototype weather imaging satellite using electro-optical/infrared cameras being built by General Atomics-Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) is set to launch by December 2026. And a second GA-EMS prototype is scheduled to launch by September 2028.

The GA-EMS prototypes, along with another prototype launched by Orion Space in March 2024, are part of the first phase in the development of the service’s Electro-Optical Infrared [EO/IR] Weather Systems (EWS) program for replacing DMSP’s imaging capabilities after 2030.

But even after those satellites are all up and running, the Space Force will continue to rely on weather data provided by other US agencies, allies and partner nations.

Weather data collection requirements for military use, called Space Based Environmental Monitoring (SBEM) capabilities, are set by the Joint Staff and the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC). The specific types of measurements on that list are considered “Controlled Unclassified Information,” the Space Force spokesperson said.

However, as highlighted in a 2023 Mitchell Institute report on DoD’s weather satellite efforts, the Air Force in 2016 [PDF] published a plan to meet the 12 JROC “core” SBEMs at the time, which several experts said have changed little over time. These include things like cloud characterization, snow depth, soil moisture, ionospheric density and sea ice characterization.

Further, the April 24 Space Force press release announcing that the first WSF-M satellites had come on line noted that it will “fulfill three high-priority [DoD] SBEM capabilities by measuring ocean surface vector winds, tropical cyclone intensity, and energetic charged particle characterization in low Earth orbit.”

The NOAA official said that of the current list of 12 SBEM priority capabilities, nine “rely entirely on partner data” rather than data from DoD sources.

“All 12 of those are supported by NOAA observing systems,” the official added.

So It GOES

The case of the GOES sats is illustrative. The Space Force for a decade has been transitioning GOES satellites to military use once NOAA lofts their replacements, in order to fill a gap in weather monitoring over the Indian Ocean and provide data to Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM). Once in service hands, those satellites are rechristened as the Electro-optical Infrared Weather System-Geostationary (EWS-G) satellites.

“The USSF relies on a strong relationship with NOAA to deliver DoD weather requirements, including leveraging two GOES satellites,” the Space Force spokesperson said. “This partnership with NOAA has enabled the Space Force to provide vital coverage to USINDOPACOM and other COCOMs at a lower cost of procuring a brand-new system. The Space Force plans to continue partnering with NOAA in the future.”

But with the various cuts expected to come down the pike, the future of the GOES arrangement is in doubt, the NOAA official said, meaning the DoD’s ability to gather enough weather data may also be in doubt.

“If GeoXO [the GOES replacement] is delayed or de-scoped significantly, we will not be able to transfer over the GOES-R legacy satellites to the US Space Force to continue the Indian Ocean mission. If they can’t count on that transfer in 2030 or 2032, they’re going to have to start building their own assets now, which is a billion-dollar investment,” the official explained.

And it’s not just information on weather on Earth that’s at stake.

The OMB passback also calls for a $57 million cut to NOAA’s Space Weather Next program, which involves two satellites to be launched to the L1 Earth-Sun Lagrange point to provide coronal imagery and measure solar winds. The agency’s original FY25 budget request would have slated almost $237 million in FY25, and $231 million in FY26 for the program.

The Space Force has been planning to use data from those satellites, the first of which is to launch in 2029 and the second in 2032. Solar flares and winds can disrupt the operations of all satellites that orbit in their paths.

“As with all NOAA satellites, the USSF will make use of the data through the Family-of-Systems framework and anticipates this satellite will benefit DoD operations,” the Space Force spokesperson said.

Congress is expected to return next week to begin hammering out their version of the federal budget – negotiations that should shed light on the future of the NOAA weather satellite program.