WALLOPS, Md. — It's an anonymous and secluded place from which to distribute satellite weather images watched by practically the whole world.
The Wallops Command and Data Acquisition Station, located near Chincoteague Island, is a vital link in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's mission to provide accurate weather data to the nation.
Passed by countless motorists every day, virtually everyone sees the results of the work that goes on there, in the form of the satellite images used in television weather broadcasts.
"Anything you see on The Weather Channel or the 11 o'clock news satellite imagery, it comes from here," operations branch chief Al McMath Jr. said. He has worked at the station since 1977 and is in his sixth year as its operations chief.
"I always say we're the best kept secret," McMath said.
The station is one of only two NOAA facilities — along with its sister station in Alaska— that track the satellites that collect vital weather data for the United States. It is from Wallops as well that commands are sent to the satellites.
Operations there began in 1966 with one antenna, which is still in use — an 85-foot diameter behemoth constructed of 350 tons of steel, located in front of the low-profile main building. The antenna tracks a NASA satellite that collects solar data.
Today at the facility there are 16 antennas monitoring various satellites — a virtual farm, spreading across a large grassy field behind the building. Two antennas are built to withstand 150 mph winds, ensuring that information will continue to be collected even during a severe hurricane.
The station also has a global reach, supporting, among other projects, Taiwanese spacecraft and French oceanographic studies. It is connected via a high-speed Internet line to Germany, where European data is sent from for retransmission.
Since its beginnings nearly a half century ago, the station could be called the office that never sleeps.
It is a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation, with almost 80 employees working in shifts around the clock. Most are electronic technicians and many have a military background.
"It never stops. ... We have to have somebody here all the time," McMath said, adding, "You call these guys at four in the morning and they answer the phone."
The Wallops station is the only one that tracks the nation's fleet of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, which provide continuous weather imagery and data over the Western Hemisphere from an orbit nearly 23,000 miles above Earth.
These satellite images, like the dramatic pictures of Hurricane Katrina approaching the Gulf Coast in August 2005, are the ones viewers of television weather broadcasts see.
In addition, the Wallops station tracks NOAA's Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites, which circle the Earth every 102 minutes, passing near the North and South poles on each orbit and together providing environmental observations for every location on Earth four times a day.
The polar-orbiting satellites, which are about 575 miles above Earth, get a closer view than the geosynchronous satellites and are able to look for things like icebergs in shipping lanes or tropical waves off the African coast that could indicate a potential hurricane forming.
In addition to this weather-related work, instruments on satellites monitored at Wallops also support search and rescue and other missions.
Since its beginnings in 1982, NOAA's Search and Rescue Satellite Aided Tracking system — in which emergency signals transmitted from airplanes, boats or individual emergency locator transmitters are relayed to a control center from which rescue efforts can be dispatched — has been used to initiate the rescues of nearly 27,000 people around the world.
Data collected by the Wallops station also are used to monitor such disparate phenomena as sea surface temperatures, forest fires, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes, among others.
The Data Collection System, used primarily by governmental agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Land Management, is among the most significant auxiliary activities at the Wallops station. It collects data from roughly the coast of Africa to the island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean.
NOAA collects, stores and sends to the agencies data from some 25,000 instruments located throughout the Western Hemisphere — everywhere from a buoy off Hawaii to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.
The instruments collect information about natural phenomena such as the cresting of flooding rivers, tides, earthquakes, tornado activity and wind data from places such as Boston Harbor or the site of a raging forest fire in Colorado.
Collecting and relaying the information is crucial because it can be used to make critical decisions in times of crisis — real-life examples include decisions made about where and when to warn people of an impending tsunami and whether to send smokejumpers into a forest fire.
An astounding 500,000 transmissions a day from these instruments are received and processed at the Wallops Command and Data Acquisition Station.
"If they don't get their data, this is where they call," McMath said.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
This article is taken from- http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/2010-11-14-satellite-data-images_N.htm
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