Contributions – open-weather

2025-08-19 09:52:56

Richard A Carter

York, United Kingdom

United Kingdom

NOAA-15

Endings are always messy – only in fiction can they be tied up neatly and beautifully, following a clear, timetabled arc towards a point where all actions are resolved, accompanied by a pithy epilogue that captures it all with suitable profundity. This time last week was meant to be the end of NOAA 15, and yet I nonetheless manage a recording this morning. I was not going to do so, but a brief glance at a Facebook group suggested that today is indeed the day that NOAA 15 will, at long last, be shut down. If the timings are true, then this morning’s pass over Europe will be the very final one. Breakfast in hand, I race to set up the antenna and make an IQ recording, a minute or two into the pass. It has rained, very softly, during the night, and the cool grey air feels more like mid-September – matching the appearance of the foliage around me. I am glad for the rain, but it is, of course, nowhere near enough to make up for this desiccating summer weather. I can still smell smoke from the ongoing Langdale fire. I am not a good writer, and I am not good at beautiful, thoughtful expression more broadly. No great poetry flows from my pen – though, I also admit, I am sometimes wary of the idea that it should be sought after, for it can belie situations that are far more quotidian, and are actually best recorded as such. The reality is that I was rather irritated with having to rapidly assemble my clumsy antenna, hook everything up, and try to record the pass amidst the damp and the overall rush of my morning routine. The antenna fell over twice, and I had to keep wiping the drizzle off my computer. I had nowhere near enough focused energy to meditate as the moment felt like it deserved, and instead I hurriedly finished the recording, disassembled my equipment, and with mild relief got back to the dozen or so tasks ahead of me – none of which have any significance at all, but which needed doing. Endings invariably happen at inconvenient times, rarely making their presence known predictably beforehand, and trying to offer a capstone statement amidst the flow of time can too readily underplay the mess of the actual moment. What else is there to write, then? Perhaps the Facebook post was wrong – maybe NOAA 15 will ring out later today, perhaps even tomorrow? I suspect not – the declared timings make sense. In any case, the closeout of NOAA 15/18/19 does not, of course, mark the end of weather observations from space – there is a veritable zoo of orbital artefacts that are diligently staring at the transforming Earth. I am currently investigating the costly challenge of trying to record some of their signals – a shift in technology and practice that mirrors worldly shifts in computing more broadly, from the faintly miraculous sound of the analogue APT downlink, and all the quirky openness it invites, to the much more slick, stratified, and expensive regimes required to interface with contemporary satellite systems. The latter are so much more capable, but are vastly more forbidding, and offer fewer windows for non-professional users to access them, whether for science or indeed art. The digital environment these satellites now feed into has so much more data coming through overall, underpinned by sprawling data centres, supercomputer clusters, and AI routines, but my sense is that it is not a richer or better place for it. I have now packed the antenna away in my office on campus. I won’t be trying again to listen to NOAA 15, absent of any 'official' confirmation of its impending shutdown. Ultimately, short of a contingency (like last week, in fact), this morning has been enough for me, and enough for this practice. It is not the technology that I am invested in, but the world that it records, and that still turns anew. Writing this at my desk, I am thinking now of all the weather that I have observed both below and amidst. I am thinking of how every moment of my life has been shaped and shifted by the presence of processes far beyond my minuscule registers of being. I think of what it means to “be” in this ocean of air, and what it means to attend to it. Weather satellites are instruments for paying attention, for trying to parse the flows of the Earth into markings and then into signs – a language all of its own. I am reflecting on how indeed everything can be read: every flow and every eddy and every sigh of wind and rain and cloud, every flare of sunlight and pall of haze, every thermal and every wave bar, every ripple of energy running through every leaf in every rustling tree. There are signals and signs all around, and I shall be listening and watching – to know them is to know one is alive in the world.

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