Fifteen Years of Collocated Radiosonde and Satellite Observations from the NOAA Products Validation System (NPROVS)

The NOAA Products Validation System (NPROVS) was developed at the NOAA/NESDIS Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) in support of the NOAA Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Environmental Data record (EDR) calibration/validation program. The primary output of NPROVS is a historical archive of collocations that match sounding footprints from a variety of satellite platforms baselined to conventional radiosonde (including ozonesonde) observations and weather (and climate) forecast data. The collocated data are typically used to support the validation of scientific upgrades and monitor the performance of the satellite product data over time. The NPROVS database contains more than 10 million collocations that have been collected over the past fifteen years. The data platforms and product suites compiled in NPROVS include:

• Radiosondes (conventional and dedicated/Global Reference Upper Air Network (GRUAN))
• NOAA Unique Combined Atmospheric Processing System (NUCAPS)
• Microwave Integrated Retrieval System (MIRS)
• Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS)
• EUMETSAT Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI)
• Constellation Observing System for Meteorology Ionosphere and Climate (COSMIC and COSMIC-2)
• GRAS Radio Occultation Measurements-EUMETSAT
• NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS) Forecast Analysis
• ECMWF Forecast Analysis
• NOAA HRRR Forecast Analysis
• NOAA Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)
• NOAA Advanced-TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder (ATOVS)

This report summarizes the design of the NPROVS system including the acquisition of data and the collocation process. It highlights the use of vertical accuracy statistics to compare data to ground truth measurements spanning from local case studies to long-term time series. This report concludes examples of real-world applications that have used data from NPROVS.