The US National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida, always uses the 1 June start date of the Atlantic hurricane season to remind coastal residents to be prepared for storms. But the lead-up to this year's season has exposed internal bickering and raised questions about whether the centre has the resources it needs.

Just days before the federal government issued a dire prediction of an above-average hurricane season — similar to the 2006 prediction (see table) — the centre's director complained very publicly about the budget he had to track and forecast those storms. Bill Proenza, who came on board as centre director early this year, criticized his bosses for spending too much money on anniversary celebrations and not enough on replacing a key satellite — the Quick Scatterometer, or QuikSCAT. At the press briefing to announce hurricane predictions on 22 May, tensions ran high as Proenza shared the stage with the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), retired vice-admiral Conrad Lautenbacher.

Table 1 Trouble ahead in the atlantic?
Full size table

The spat reveals some long-simmering disputes between the various agencies that make up NOAA. The agency was cobbled together in 1970 from a number of existing groups (the oldest being the Coast and Geodetic Survey, which dates back to 1807 and is the basis for NOAA's '200th-anniversary' celebrations this year). As often with such unions, it hasn't always been a happy one.

Bill Proenza wants less partying and more money for hurricane-watching satellites. Credit: R. MAYER/S. FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL/MCT/NEWSCOM

Proenza and some other researchers complain that NOAA is trying to usurp the identities of the individual services that make it up. The agency has, for example, proposed changing the names of the National Hurricane Center and its parent, the National Weather Service, to the NOAA Hurricane Center and the NOAA Weather Service.

Disputes about service names may sound petty, but there are bigger underlying problems. Proenza charges that NOAA spent a disproportionate $4 million on anniversary celebrations aimed at outreach, and not enough on forecasting. NOAA's budget is roughly $4 billion; of that, $6 million goes to the hurricane centre. An agency spokesman disputes the outreach figure, saying it has amounted to only $1.5 million over two years, and Lautenbacher says the centre gets enough to do its job.

Fund the weather service or die.

“They both need more money,” says James Baker, who headed NOAA between 1993 and 2001. He defends outreach, pointing out that the agency is not as well known as NASA even though its mission is arguably more critical to people's lives. “I used to say, 'fund the weather service or die',” he says. “Trying to publicize and get the message out is good for both NOAA and the weather service.”

NOAA's $4-billion budget suffers particularly in comparison to NASA's $16 billion. Whereas the space agency is tasked with building and flying research satellites for Earth observation, NOAA is the agency in charge of turning them into long-term operational reality. In recent years, a series of reports from the National Research Council has identified problems in making smooth transitions from one to the other without loss of data in between.

Of particular concern for hurricane forecasting is the QuikSCAT satellite, launched by NASA in 1999. An instrument known as SeaWinds aboard the satellite measures the direction and speed of winds by bouncing microwaves off the ocean surface and measuring them on their return to the satellite. The resulting data are used to improve hurricane forecasts as storms gather speed and change direction.

But the satellite has passed its nominal five-year life, and Proenza has made a particular point of arguing for a successor. If SeaWinds failed, he says, the accuracy of three-day hurricane forecasts would drop by about 16%.

A second version of SeaWinds was launched aboard the Japanese ADEOS-II satellite in 2003, but failed just months later. Another replacement, NASA's Ocean Vector Winds mission, was cancelled early this decade.

In their place, Lautenbacher points to the joint military–civilian Coriolis satellite. It carries an instrument known as WindSat, which uses a different technique from SeaWinds for detecting wind speeds and direction — rather than bouncing microwaves off the sea surface, it detects emission of microwaves from the surface.

SeaWinds has better spatial resolution than WindSat and works better under weak winds and rainy conditions, says its principal investigator, Timothy Liu of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But WindSat does some things that SeaWinds cannot — it can provide multiple sets of data simultaneously, counters its lead scientist, Peter Gaiser of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC.

Nevertheless, QuikSCAT is at least five years past the end of its nominal lifespan, and Congress has begun to get worried. Several members of Congress are pressuring NASA and NOAA for more details on what they plan to do when QuikSCAT fails.

Any potential replacement would take time to put together. QuikSCAT itself was hastily pulled together and launched just two years after a previous instrument failed without warning, but only because key parts had already been built for other purposes.

In the meantime, tensions will continue to bubble, although Lautenbacher makes the conflict seem welcome. “You have to remember that Mr Proenza just took over as the head of the hurricane centre, and he is known for being a very strong and forceful advocate for his programmes,” he says. “And that's one of the reasons why we love him.”