Forecasters are facing a major data gap during the heart of hurricane season after NOAA's primary eastern weather satellite unexpectedly went offline.
Engineers say the GOES-19 satellite experienced a technical anomaly and entered a protective safehold mode. The spacecraft serves as the primary eye in the sky for tracking tropical systems in the Atlantic and monitoring drifting Canadian wildfire smoke.
The outage could directly impact weather monitoring in eastern North Carolina. Forecasters are currently watching a low-pressure system off the Southeast coast that is expected to bring heavy rain to the region starting late Sunday. Without the primary satellite, meteorologists lose critical real-time imagery used to track these developing coastal storms.
Federal officials have not released a timeline for restoring the satellite. In the meantime, NOAA is scrambling older backup satellites to maintain basic tracking across the coast, though it could take weeks to get those backup assets into the perfect orbital position.
