Quantifying the Relative Value of Potential NOAA Constellations to Inform Trade Studies

The NOAA/NESDIS Office of System Architecture and Engineering (SAE) has been carrying out a Flight Architecture Study since 2022 to determine cost-effective constellation designs to meet various levels of performance. To date, the Flight Architecture Study has measured constellation performance relative to meeting requirements for geophysical metrics like resolution and update rate, at either the threshold, expected, or maximum effective level of observational objectives. NESDIS has also been developing the Advanced Systems Performance Evaluation tool for NOAA (ASPEN), which enables rapid assessment of the value of environmental data from observing systems. The value assessments from ASPEN represent the benefits of the constellations’ observations to one or more applications in terms of the corresponding geophysical variables and their attributes weighted by priority. In this poster, we discuss ongoing work to bring together the constellation design work being done as part of the Flight Architecture Study with constellation value assessments as calculated by ASPEN. The combination of the two efforts will enable NESDIS to produce potential future constellations that are optimized to bring the most value to NOAA users.