A Service-Oriented Reference Architecture for NOAA Satellite Calibration and Validation System Development and Integration

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is targeting to transform the current stove-piped satellite ground systems into a common services-based enterprise to meet the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS)’s strategic objective of developing agile and scalable ground capabilities. The common ground enterprise will provide better support to weather satellite control and data processing. Among weather satellite operations, Calibration and Validation (Cal/Val) of satellite instruments (sensors) and algorithms play a crucial role for providing high-quality data products to users, such as the National Weather Service (NWS), NASA, DoD, USGS, etc. Since the current NOAA weather satellite Cal/Val systems and activities are still mission/task-driven, it is important to develop an enterprise reference architecture to guide the integration of current Cal/Val systems into a common service for improved operation/management efficiency and cost-saving. The reference architecture can also be used to support future service-oriented Cal/Val system development.

In this paper we will discuss 1) Activity Model to describe satellite Cal/Val operations conducted by the NOAA/NESDIS Cal/Val teams; 2) Functional Architecture to model the current satellite Cal/Val systems; 3) Proposed Service-Oriented Reference Architecture to guide service-oriented Cal/Val system development and integration; and 4) Proposed Success Measures to evaluate service-oriented system design.