When It Rains It Pours

摘要

The U.S. Air Force has identified at least two looming gaps in weather satellite data that could be addressed by the types of unconventional solutions that the service should be ready and equipped to adopt. One is for constant weather coverage of U.S. Central Command's area of responsibility - Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia - currently provided by the European weather satellite organization's geostationary-orbiting Meteosat-7 satellite, which is slated for retirement in 2016. The other is for global ocean vector winds data from the Naval Research Laboratory's (NRL) 12-year-old WindSat satellite, which could fail at any time.