Intro to NESDIS Next Generation Ground Enterprise Architecture

NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service (NESDIS) provides critical environmental observations for the understanding of weather, water, and climate in a rapidly changing world, and must maintain space and ground systems capabilities to ensure continuity. The US Government and partners are relying on NESDIS to continue to provide state-of-the-art environmental satellite services well beyond 2035 but those provided by current programs are projected to reach their end-of-life and eventually fall below required assurance levels by or before 2035.

Replacement of the current flight and ground system architectures requires innovative ways to meet the growing user needs while balancing cost. The NESDIS Ground Enterprise Study (NGES) was undertaken over three years to identify the most capable and cost-effective ground architecture(s) for NESDIS to invest in for near-, mid-, and long-term success of its mission. NGES addressed the full range of NESDIS ground operations including satellite operations, science operations and data operations covering major near-term activities beginning in 2023 for evolving the next-generation ground systems needed to support current architectures, and support of the future target reference space architecture for operation in 2035-2050. This study identified multiple alternative architectures (and combinations of architectures) to consider variations of how NESDIS could accomplish key functional attributes that support ground operations functions.

The authors will describe the study and its purpose, review activities over the last year, and introduce the remainder of the session on Next Generation Ground Systems Architecture for Weather Satellites.