The Use of Temperature and Water Vapor Profiles for Tropical Cyclone Weather Applications: Recent Activities within the NOAA/JPSS Proving Ground Sounding Initiative

The NOAA Unique Combined Atmospheric Processing System (NUCAPS) is the operational retrieval system for sounding products from the Suomi National-Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) and the recently launched NOAA-20 satellite. NUCAPS produces cloud-cleared radiances from the Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) field-of-regard that is co-located with the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) in order to provide information as close to the surface as possible. Numerous environmental data products (EDR) are derived from the cloud cleared radiances including, profiles of atmospheric temperature, moisture, ozone and other trace gases, cloud altitude, cloud fraction, surface products, and derived products such as convective available potential energy and convective inhibition.

NUCAPS products are available in near real time in both the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS-II) and the Community Satellite Processing Package (CCSP). This presentation will discuss a recent multi-agency field campaign, supported, in part, by the NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) Joint Polar Satellite Systems (JPSS) Office. The field campaign’s primary science goal was to improve the understanding of the impact of the Saharan Air Layer (SAL) in tropical cyclone genesis in the Atlantic.

We will show how direct broadcast NUCAPS products offer critical real-time support to flight planning and storm analysis. We will also show how the in-situ field campaign measurements helped validate and evaluate NUCAPS products for use in tropical cyclone forecasting. This study demonstrates how the JPSS program benefits from field campaigns – not only do field campaign measurements allow product validation but the synergistic collaboration among field campaign participants help evaluate new product applications.