Innovations and Technological Advances in Support of Cost-sustainability of NOAA’s Future Ground System Architectures

NOAA recognizes the need for future expansion and scalability to receive, ingest, process, and disseminate ever-growing streams of data originating from diverse national and international sources, including government sources and commercial partners. This increase is attributable to a significant rise in both the volume of data and the number of satellites required, along with the enhanced complexity of data exploitation methods. NESDIS acknowledges the critical need for scalable and flexible ground processing infrastructure. This recognition stems from the trend towards smaller, lower-cost satellites that, while cost-efficient, have shorter lifespans, necessitating greater agility in ground processing. Objective studies have quantitatively demonstrated this need, confirming the imperative for NESDIS to embrace new technologies and inventive concepts for future architectural expansion. The System Architecture and Engineering (SAE) team of NESDIS is experimenting with innovations and technological advances to bring about cost-effective and sustainable ground architectures that support NOAA’s future satellite operations. These innovations and technological advances may include new generations of satellite systems, extended automations in operations and Command and Control, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning (AI/ML/DL) capabilities across the value chain, and end to end cloud migration.

This paper is structured around three pivotal focus areas of NESDIS ground operations:

• Constellation Mission Operation
• Next Generation Ground Infrastructure
• Data Processing and Dissemination

For each focus area, we will give a brief description of the candidate innovations and technological advances that SAE views as viable approaches to support long term cost-sustainability of the NESDIS ground system of the future. Other presentations will offer more details and specific examples in each of these three focus areas. The paper concludes with preliminary lessons learned and an insight into future directions.