Research to Operations Activities of NASA's Short-Term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center: Current and Future Missions and Capabilities

The Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is a NASA- and NOAA-funded activity that supports research to operations activities for experimental and near real-time observation and modeling capabilities with an emphasis on the operational weather community. Activities focus on supporting short-term weather forecasting on local to regional scales. Starting in the southeastern United States, over a decade of activities have included an expansion of data products, training, and collaborations to partnerships with over 30 Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) across all 6 Natuonal Weather Service (NWS) regions, and several National Centers. SPoRT has established, sustained, and evolved a successful R2O and O2R paradigm to facilitate operational use of NASA, NOAA, academia, and other partner research outcomes in an operational setting. Keys to this paradigm are active collaboration and communication with end users, inclusion of products in operational decision-making support systems, emphasis on training materials tailored to end-user needs, and collaborative partnerships between developers and end users to integrate feedback into further product development.

This presentation will highlight recent accomplishments in SPoRT focus areas of remote sensing, land surface modeling and data assimilation, use of total lightning information, and related efforts supporting the operational weather community. Early outcomes demonstrating utility of new and future NASA missions are discussed, including opportunities to leverage the successful SPoRT R2O/O2R model in new directions supporting disaster response and space weather.