Current Status and Future Plan of the KMA Satellite Program (Invited Presentation)

The Geo-KOMPSAT-2A (located in 128.2°E) geostationary meteorological satellite managed by the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) began operation at 00 UTC on 25 July 2019 (launched on 4 December 2018), continuing the COMS (Communication, Ocean and Meteorological Satellite) mission of strengthening Korea’s capability to monitor the atmospheric environment over Asia-Pacific region. The Geo-KOMPSAT-2A data and images are now available through NMSC webpage (http://nmsc.kma.go.kr/enhome/html/main/main.do).

KMA produces 52 geophysical products with categorized information such as scene/surface, cloud/rainfall, radiation/aerosol, and atmospheric condition and aviation. These products have been validated to evaluate the maturity and improve their algorithms. KMA also utilizes the AMI data focusing on nowcasting and short-range forecast application, and expects to improve the NWP performance as increased in number of inputs as well as temporal resolution. Geo-KOMPSAT-2A will be also utilized in various fields such as climate change monitoring, hydrology and so on.

For the meteorological observation, KMA operates the 10-minute timeline (3 observation areas: full disk, extended local area (3,800 by 2,400 km²) and target observation (1000 by 1000 km²). KMA will provide rapid scan images (two minutes interval) to the users over the Asian Pacific region (RA II and RA V) by receiving the users’ official request via dedicated web tool. KMA expects that the rapid scan images could provide significant improvements in the real-time monitoring of hazardous weather such as Typhoon, thunderstorm and volcano events.

KMA broadcasts all 16 channels of AMI in full resolution via GK2A named Ultra HRIT and also maintains HRIT broadcast corresponding to COMS five channels. And the landline based real-time FTP data service (cloud-like service) is also available. Registration is required and currently 11 countries are registered.