GOES-R Training Plan for NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) Forecasters

GOES-R Training Plan for NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) Forecasters LeRoy Spayd & Anthony Mostek – NWS Chief Learning Office James Gurka – CICS (U. MD) ABSTRACT The GOES-R satellite is scheduled for launch in October 2016. The new instruments on GOES-R, while providing a great leap forward, will also offer a significant challenge to ensure that the users are ready to exploit the new capabilities and translate these advances into improved forecast and warning services. The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) will provide 5 times faster scanning, a fourfold improvement in spatial resolution, 11 additional spectral channels, and improvements in radiometric accuracy and image navigation. GOES-R will also host advanced space weather instruments plus a totally new instrument, the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM), which will provide continuous lightning detection over a large portion of the Western Hemisphere, mapping total lightning (intra cloud, and cloud-to-ground) flash rates and trends.. To ensure users are ready, the NWS and their partners in NESDIS and NOAA's cooperative institutes have developed a comprehensive training plan for operational forecasters. The plan consists of several phases, Foundation Course, Application Phase, Archived Exercise Cases, “Make it Stick” and Continuous Learning. Implementation of the plan is underway and will continue well beyond the launch of GOES-R in October 2016, and JPSS in January 2017. The goal of the training plan is to ensure that forecasters are ready to integrate GOES-R data and products into forecast and warning operations from the beginning of GOES-R operations. Foundational training will be available just prior to launch utilizing examples from the Japanese Himawari satellite and will consist of a series of short modules totaling 8-9 hours of learning. Application training will be prepared when live data becomes available in January 2017. After forecasters complete the training modules they should be able to: 1) understand the differences between legacy GOES and GOES-R observations; 2) interpret and utilize GOES-R ABI imagery and derived products in the preparation of NWS forecasts and warnings; 3) utilize the GLM in forecast and warning operations; and 4) understand the fundamentals of Red-Green-Blue (RGB) satellite product techniques and apply these to the identification of meteorological phenomena. There are several groups responsible for developing, delivering and updating the training, including the NWS Office of the Chief Learning Officer (mainly the Warning Decision Training Division and the Forecast Decision Training Division), NESDIS, the Virtual Institute for Satellite Integration Training (VISIT), the satellite liaisons at NOAA's cooperative institutes (CIRA, CIMSS, CIMMS, CICS), NASA SPoRT and UCAR's Cooperative Program for Meteorology Education and Training (COMET).