NOAA's data exploitation of future polar-orbiting operational environmental satellites

NOAA's National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Data Exploitation (NDE) project will provide operational civilian users of environmental satellite information with data from the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) and the Joint Polar-orbiting Satellite System (JPSS) which was formerly known as the NPOESS program. Through NDE, heritage users will continue to receive polar-orbiting satellite data to maintain their current missions, and new users can take advantage of the improved and expanded suite of products that the NPP-era and JPSS-era sensors will provide. NDE will receive environmental, sensor, and temperature data records from NPP/JPSS and tailor them to satisfy user-required attributes such as data format, coverage, frequency, and map projection. NDE will also apply value-added science algorithms to certain data records to generate NOAA-unique products (NUPs) in order to meet NOAA-unique mission requirements. NDE has worked with users such as the National Weather Service's National Centers for Environmental Prediction and others to understand requirements and has developed a prioritized list of initial products. The initial focus of NOAA-unique products will be atmospheric sounding products, microwave surface and precipitation products, and derived sea surface temperature products such as anomalies and coral reef bleaching indices and alerts. Subsequent NUPs will include polar winds, vegetation health, ocean color, and atmospheric chemistry data records. This paper describes the phased development and introduction of NPP products, plans for staging NPP data to support operational users, and the NDE efforts to prepare end users to access and evaluate NPP products. It will also describe future product processing plans from the JPSS.