GOES-R Imagery: Readiness and Quality Assurance

In preparation for the improved imagery from the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on GOES-R, the GOES-R Imagery and Calibration Working Group (CWG) support teams at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) / University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison are engaged in many activities related to quality assurance. The Cloud and Moisture Imagery Product (CMIP) is the Key Performance Product (KPP) for GOES-R. The team's activities include preparing for the generation of “first light” images and L2b imagery quality assurance. McIDAS-X and McIDAS-V have both been employed in ABI imagery generation. For quality assurance, the teams are developing tools and scripts which incorporate elements of McIDAS-X, McIDAS-V, Matlab, IDL, and Glance. Glance is file comparison software developed under the GOES-R AWG at UW-Madison to interrogate file differences; Matlab and IDL are commercial software packages; McIDAS-X and McIDAS–V are visualization software packages developed at the UW-Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC). McIDAS-V scripts which generate quality assurance statistics have been used on current GOES Imager 3.9 micrometer and 10.7 micrometer data to warn on stray light contaminated images. The team has also developed a tool to generate independent CMIP files from L1b radiance files and compare to ground-system CMIP files to validate their contents.