Operational Products from New-Generation Operational Environment Satellites at Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center(FNMOC)

The new generation operational environment satellites, including Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-16/17, Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) and Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS)-1, provide unprecedented capabilities for weather forecasting and tropical cyclone monitoring. GOES-16, located at 75.2W, is the first of the four new generation geostationary satellites operated by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on GOES-16 provides much higher spatial and temporal resolution imagery of the Earth than those from the imager onboard previous GOES satellites. JPSS-1 is the first of the NOAA’s latest generation of polar-orbiting, non-geosysnchronous environment satellites. The four key instruments onboard JPSS-1 are Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS), Cross-Track Infrared Sounder (CrIS), Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), and Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS). They provide sounding observations, humidity and temperature profiles, global visible and infrared observations, and ozone-profile records. The data from these instruments are critical for initializing numerical environmental prediction (NEP) models.

Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC), the US Navy’s numerical weather forecast and data reach-back center, operationally ingests and processes GOES-16, NPP and JPSS-1 data. Wind vectors from GOES-16, NPP and JPSS-1 are operationally assimilated into the Navy Global Environmental Model (NAVGEM). NPP and JPSS-1 ATMS brightness temperature, VIIRS infrared and visible imagery have been applied to FNMOC operational Tropical Cyclone (TC) web page and Sat-Focus web page for TC monitoring, TC intensity fixing and other tactical applications for Navy operations. GOES-16 ABI infrared, visible, water vapor and cloud top products are also utilized to fill the global coverage gap (caused by the shutdown of GOES-13) to increase the FNMOC TC and Sat-focus functions. In this presentation, we will describe how data are disseminated and produced and the impacts of them in the data assimilation process within Navy NEP models.