With final action pending by the US House and Senate on a Fiscal Year 2004 appropriations bill, the fate of the Space Environment Center (SEC)
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/ in Boulder, Colorado, hangs in the balance. The FY 2004 Senate appropriations bill has eliminated funds for the SEC and for all space weather-related activities in the center’s parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The House version of the appropriations bill holds the center’s funding at $5.2 million. The White House requested $8.3 million for the SEC. Seattle-based ARRL propagation bulletin editor Tad Cook, K7RA, says the possible loss of SEC’s funding has him very concerned.
“The NOAA SEC provides all of the data for our weekly propagation bulletin http://www.arrl.org/w1aw/prop/ ,” Cook said. “It is SEC staff that prepares the forecasts that I rely on when I tell readers what the geomagnetic and solar indices will be during a given forecast period.” Cook encourages ARRL members to contact their senators and representatives in Congress http://thomas.loc.gov/home/legbranch/legbranch.html , urging them to restore the SEC’s funding.
The Space Environment Center provides real-time monitoring and forecasting of solar and geophysical events (see the Space Weather Now Web site
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SWN/ ). Those include solar flares and geomagnetic disturbances that can affect radio wave propagation. The SEC Radio User’s Page http://www.sec.noaa.gov/radio/ includes data and information specific to the current state of the ionosphere. The center also conducts research in solar-terrestrial physics and develops techniques to forecast solar and geophysical disturbances.
With the US Air Force, the SEC also operates the Space Weather Operations Center http://www.sec.noaa.gov/AboutSEC/swo_page.html which serves as the national and world warning center for disturbances that can affect people and equipment–such as astronauts and communications satellites–working in the space environment.
“It is the government’s official source for alerts and warnings of disturbances,” Center Director Ernest Hildner explained in a recent posting to SEC clients.
A Senate Appropriations Committee Report included a terse explanation on funding cut. “The ‘Atmospheric’ in NOAA does not extend to the astral,” the report said. “Absolutely no funds are provided for solar observation. Such activities are rightly the bailiwick of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Air Force.”
The Department of Defense, NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration are among the SEC’s customers, which also include the airlines, electric power grid operators, communications facilities, satellite operators, the National Space Weather Program and commercial providers of value-added space weather services.
Hildner said that unless the SEC’s appropriation level is increased in a House-Senate conference committee, the most optimistic outlook is that the SEC will shrink to less than half its capability–the House funding level–or go away altogether under the Senate bill.
“In this case,” he concluded, “the nation’s space weather service will have to be reconstituted in some other agency, at greater cost and lesser capability, to meet the nation’s needs.”