Product Updates to International MODIS/AIRS Processing Package (IMAPP) and Transition to JPSS

The International MODIS/AIRS Processing Package (IMAPP) allows ground stations capable of receiving direct broadcast data from the NASA Terra and Aqua spacecraft to create a suite of products from MODIS, AIRS, and AMSU. IMAPP is a NASA-funded and freely-distributed software package developed at Space Science and Engineering Center of University of Wisconsin-Madison that has over 2,200 users in 76 countries. It is supported on Intel Linux hosts. A complete processing system for MODIS atmosphere, land, and ocean products is also available as a Virtual Appliance for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

In this poster we showcase the capabilities of several recently updated or newly released IMAPP software packages, specifically Virtual Appliance v2.0, Polar2Grid v2.0, RealEarth WMS v2.0, IDEA-I (aerosol, ozone, work-in-progress), and VIS v1.0 (our recently released visibility and fog / low stratus product).

IMAPP Virtual Appliance v2.0 was released in April 2015 and provides an easy to install fully-featured processing system for creating a range of atmosphere, land, and ocean products from MODIS. It includes MODIS Level 2 v3.1 package, separately released in March 2015, as well as software packages and utilities from the NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group, the NASA GSFC Direct Readout Laboratory, the University of Lille, and the University of Dundee. It can be installed, configured, and be creating data products within 30 minutes of download; it is highly reliable and fault tolerant, and efficiently executes on modestly specified modern computer hardware.

Polar2Grid v2.0, released in October 2015, is a set of tools for extracting swath data from earth-observing satellite instruments, remapping it to uniform grids, and writing that gridded data to a new file format. Polar2Grid operates on the idea of satellite “products”; data observed by a satellite instrument. These products can be any type of raster data, such as temperatures, reflectances, radiances, or any other value that may be recorded by, or calculated from, a satellite instrument. It can, for example, be applied to IMAPP output products to make the GeoTIFF imagery required for the IMAPP RealEarth Web Mapping Service (WMS).

RealEarth WMS v2.0, released in March 2016, enables users to display satellite imagery in a Google Maps or Google Earth interface. It is distributed as a virtual machine (VM) that is capable of displaying MODIS and VIIRS GeoTIFF images created using Polar2Grid v2.0. IMAPP RealEarth allows users to prepare products generated by their IMAPP installation for display in Google Maps, and share that imagery with users through a web mapping service.

IDEA-I (Infusion of Satellite Data into Environmental Applications - International) has been released in two versions, for aerosols (v1.1 released January 2014) and for ozone stratospheric intrusions (v1.0 released May 2014). IDEA-I is a real-time system for trajectory-based forecasts of aerosol dispersion (from MODIS) and ozone stratospheric intrusions (from CrIS, AIRS, and IASI). We now turn our attention to the use of satellite measurements from Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Suomi-NPP instruments operational since 2012, for trajectory-based predictions of smoke dispersion from wildfires and of urban-sourced air pollution for which we will leverage VIIRS AOD and the NOAA-Unique CrIS-ATMS Processing System (NUCAPS) carbon monoxide (CO) retrievals (a new data product made possible by the release of full spectral-resolution CrIS measurements since December 2014).

The newly released IMAPP Aerosol Visibility and Fog/Low Stratus (FLS) software consists of binary executables, static ancillary data, execution bash shell scripts, plus python image creation scripts. It includes the GEOstationary Cloud Algorithm Testbed (GEOCAT) executable, which was modified for use with MODIS data, and which serves as a framework for running the Aerosol Visibility and FLS software. The IMAPP Aerosol Visibility and FLS software package also includes python code to create images that display the location visibility classes and fog/low stratus probabilities on a map. The data product is in HDF4 and contains the visibility and fog/low stratus products and information relevant to the algorithm.