(Adds quote from Sen. Bill Nelson, paragraphs 11-12; edits)

By Jim Loney

MIAMI, July 9 (Reuters) - The director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center, a critical government agency that issues hurricane and tropical storm forecasts, was ousted on Monday after a staff mutiny.

Bill Proenza, who was appointed to the top hurricane job about six month ago, was embroiled in controversy after criticizing his Washington bosses for spending money on public relations while an aging weather satellite needed replacement.

After vowing not to be silenced, Proenza faced a revolt at the Miami hurricane center last week, when 23 staff members, about half the work force, issued a petition calling for him to resign.

They said Proenza had "poisoned the atmosphere" at the hurricane center, which also issues weather information widely used by countries throughout the Caribbean basin.

"We need to move forward," said Dennis Feltgen, the hurricane center's spokesman. "Effective immediately, Ed Rappaport will serve as acting director on an interim basis."

Rappaport, a veteran hurricane forecaster, was the center's deputy director.

Hurricane forecasts are used by local governments in the United States to determine coastal evacuations and can move energy and insurance markets when storms threaten major population centers or oil and gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

Proenza's initial volleys in a high-profile campaign to replace the aging QuikSCAT satellite won the support of several Florida politicians who portrayed him as a whistle-blower shedding light on the failings of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the hurricane center.

Proenza said loss of the satellite, launched in 1999, would reduce the accuracy of long-range storm track forecasts by up to 16 percent.

But some of the hurricane center's veteran forecasters said Proenza had exaggerated the importance of the satellite and plunged the agency into a distracting political battle just as the June 1-Nov. 30 hurricane season was heating up.

Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who was one of Proenza's biggest backers in his showdown with NOAA, still appeared to support him in a statement issued after word of his departure from the top job at the hurricane center.

"I'm troubled by budget shortfalls in the weather agency, not to mention the failure to properly plan for replacing an aging weather satellite that gives forecasters valuable information," Nelson said in a statement. "The administration needs to fix this mess -- and, fix it now."

Proenza was named hurricane center director in January to replace Max Mayfield, who became a household name in the United States during the record-setting 2005 Atlantic hurricane season when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans.

NOAA said Proenza was still an agency employee, but a spokesman, who said Proenza was now "on leave," declined to elaborate.

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