A plan to cancel a longstanding agreement between the Defense Department and NOAA that provided critical data to aid in hurricane forecasting has been reversed.
The contract between the U.S. Space Force, which operates the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, was expected to terminate Thursday. It will now continue, according to NOAA spokesperson Erica Cei.
“There will be no interruption to DMSP data delivery and NOAA will continue to have access to data from DMSP for the duration of the Program’s life span,” Cei wrote in an email.
The DMSP was created in the 1960s to provide global weather and space information to the Defense Department, which has long shared data with NOAA to help predict weather. The program relies on a constellation of satellites that collect high-resolution microwave data to measure a variety of conditions.
