WEATHER : Future Cloudy for Forecasters of Hurricanes : Two satellites that track storms are nearing the end of their life expectancy.

It’s hurricane season in the Atlantic, and for about 40 million residents of the U.S. East and Gulf coasts, a warning to leave home and run for the hills will come from here. But this year, forecasters worry whether they will be able to do the job adequately. “We’re faced with catastrophic equipment failure, and no backup,” said National Hurricane Center director Robert C. Sheets.

The equipment Sheets is worried about is GOES-7, the only U.S. weather satellite now in orbit, and the single most important tool in detecting and tracking hurricanes. GOES-7 is running low on fuel and nearing the end of its five-year life expectancy.

“We’re on borrowed time, and in a precarious situation right now,” Sheets said.

So critical is the situation that last week a Senate subcommittee urged President Bush to declare a national emergency over the decrepit state of the nation’s weather satellites, and then somehow come up with money to build new ones. But quick action is not expected.

In recent years, Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, held between gravity and centrifugal force at a point 22,300 miles over the Equator, have served as forecasters’ eyes in the sky over the warm water spawning ground of tropical storms in the Atlantic and Caribbean. The satellites continuously photograph the oceans and send those images to earth.

Normally, the United States has two GOES satellites aloft. But one died after the 1988 season, and its replacement blew up in a botched launch. In a stopgap measure, the United States earlier this year borrowed a backup satellite from Europe and shifted it westward to help cover the eastern Atlantic. But it is expected to die soon, too.

Without those two satellites, forecasters would not be completely blind. Polar-orbiting satellites would provide forecasters some still photos of the oceans.

But missing would be the time-lapse images which allow forecasters to spot in the clouds the characteristic cyclonic swirl that makes hurricanes so ferocious and deadly.

“Am I nervous about it?” says Sheets. “Sure.”

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had planned to launch the next generation of weather satellites, called GOES-NEXT, in 1989. But the $1.1-billion program is $500 million over budget and more than two years behind schedule.

Federal officials now say the new satellites, designed by NASA and built by private contractors, are so riddled with defects that they may never get off the ground.

Rep. Howard Wolpe (D-Mich.), chairman of the investigative and oversight subcommittee of the Science, Space and Technology Committee, called NASA’s handling of the project “a fiasco which puts peoples’ lives at risk.”

For Sheets and his bosses at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service, the breakdown of the GOES-NEXT program, along with the uncertain life-span of the weather satellites now in space, have given rise to a “NO-GOES” scenario which includes the possibility of buying a satellite from Japanese or European makers, and an emergency plan that could come into play later this hurricane season.

That plan means more air time for 10 “Hurricane Tracker” C-130 planes on standby at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss., to fly into budding storm systems and monitor development.

Forecasters would also make greater use of reports from ships at sea and a scattered network of weather buoys.

Without satellites, however, hurricane forecaster Richard Pasch predicts coverage of even monster storms such as Hurricane Hugo in 1989 “would be hit and miss.”

“When that storm was east of the Leeward Islands, we might not even have known it was there if not for the satellite,” says Pasch of Hugo, which ripped through the Caribbean and slammed into Charleston, S.C., killing at least 20 people and causing $5 billion in damage. “Back in the 1940s and 1950s the center of storms had to pass directly over a weather buoy or a ship at sea before we knew much about them,” says Pasch. “Locating storms was a bit random.

“If we lose the satellites, I think a lot of people would be very concerned, There’d be a lot of uneasiness. It would certainly make our job more difficult. We’d have to do a lot of guessing.”