First of all, ocean surveillance satellites are ELINT/SIGINT satellites, so posting about cloud cover has fuck-all to do with anything.
“He’s talking gibberish” is the likeliest explanation once you break this down into Trump-sized bites of data;
- Nuclear is powerful, nobody knew how powerful the nuclear was, I can tell you that
- Submarines have the nuclear; they’re hidden, very smart, not like Crooked Hillary telling everybody, oh, our submarines are gonna be over here
- Therefore, submarines are very powerful, tremendous, much more than the carriers that don’t have nuclear, North Korea is gonna be calling me in a few weeks and we’re gonna make a deal, great deal, everyone’s gonna love it, trust me
I would imagine any one of Japan’s 7 operational Information Gathering Satellites could track an aircraft carrier.
I would wager that each of the world’s major naval powers has somebody that tracks the location of all of the vessels of all the other naval powers. The Russians know where all the Chinese, American, British, French, and Canadian vessels are at any given time. Likewise each of the others about all of the others. Compared to the tens of thousands of commercial aircraft, there aren’t that many ships and they don’t move all that fast. Keeping tabs on all the world’s navies probably isn’t that difficult.
Do you imagine that the US doesn’t know where US ships are?
It certainly seems like the Trump administration is the last to know.
No. Sorry I wasn’t clear. The undergrad major was simply PolSci. But every elective I took w/in that major was international relations, and I took several classes from and worked closely with one particular prof who was pretty significantly involved in the SALT/START treaties.
Gotta be right up there on any short list of “most worthless majors down the road!” 
Things aren’t always the way they seem, but I just think it’s funny how so many people are arguing “but of course a country like Japan knows where the US ships are”, but are OK with “of course a country like the US doesn’t know where its ships are”.
I doubt very much that the US Navy command lost their carrier fleet. Any loss of signal fidelity is between the military and the White House in this instance.
South Korean reaction on CNN.
They’re just “keeping you in suspense.” It’s all part of Trump’s upcoming book, The Art of the Squeal: How to Keep Both Your Eniemies and Allies on Unstable Ground in Order to Get More Real Estate and Trademark Concessions.
Stranger
What you didn’t know, was that the sabre-rattlin’ mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even tell Sean Spicer for a week. Very first light, Quicksilver, media come cruisin’ by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was a reporter come to the nearest Republican, that white man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and sometimes that journalist, he go away. But sometimes he wouldn’t go away.
Sometimes Donald Trump looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about The Donald is he’s got lifeless eyes… black eyes, like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… ‘til he says “My inauguration numbers were great, great, the biggest ever” and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’ of “Lock her up! Lock her up!”
This is Jonathan Solomon. He was a Surface Warfare Officer from 2000 - 2004. A few years ago he wrote an article called “Maritime Deception and Concealment: Concepts for Defeating Wide-Area Oceanic Surveillance Reconnaissance-Strike Networks” In it, he wrote:
Why do you think he bothered to include that in his article if “cloud cover has fuck-all to do with anything”?
He also states:
Link for those who haven’t seen it yet. It’s Spicer at is Spicest
I say you’re in no position to lecture others about military satellite capabilities, and you post about mostly over the horizon radar.
Great. You showed me. But good.
I’m struggling to see this as something other than the stereotypical liberal if-you-disagree-with-me-you-must-be-racist response. It’s not “prejudice, arrogance, and ignorance” to acknowledge the facts and reality of the situation. The USA has several multiples of the number of satellites in orbit that China does. Our Navy has significantly-more ISR assets than North Korea’s. Our space program is the only one to have successfully landed a functioning rover on Mars, or reused spacecraft. It’s got nothing to do with ‘them dirty furriners’ being dumb and incapable, but lets try to ground ourselves in reality.
In addition to seeing the ships directly, a ship the size and speed of an aircraft carrier is going to leave one heck of a wake, much, much larger than the ship itself. Even if the ship itself is under a cloud, you’re likely to be able to see the wake, and seeing that will tell you the position of the ship, its direction of motion, and its speed. And launching a satellite that can see that is a heck of a lot easier than reaching the Moon or Mars, and will be high on the priority list of any nation that has any satellites at all.
He Blinded them with Bullshit!
(…apologies to Thomas Dolby)
He is listing the limitations of specific technologies. But as already mentioned by many posters, SAR is a completely different technology from EO, IR or OTH-B.
By the way, this page has an example of how an aircraft carrier looks like on SAR satellite imagery.
And do you think there are any limitations to the SAR technology?
Also, over half of the Chinese Yaogan satellite network is believed to be optical, not SAR.