Satellite Imagery Display and Analysis System (SIDAS): Tropical Cyclone Applications at the Air Force Weather Agency

Since 1989, the Headquarters Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) has been providing global meteorological satellite (METSAT) based estimates of tropical cyclone position, intensity, and gale wind radius to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) and the National Hurricane Center (NHC). Today, this support is conducted using fourth-generation software to display METSAT data in addition to other data elements. This software is called the Satellite Imagery Display and Analysis System, Second Generation (SIDAS-II). Based on visualization techniques that are native to the Interactive Data Language (IDL), SIDAS-II uses a platform independent, object-oriented approach to display METSAT data from a diverse number of sources, including all U.S. and Foreign geostationary satellites, along with several polar/non-geostationary satellite data sets, such as from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), NOAA Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites (POES), and several NASA EOS satellites (Quikscat, TRMM, TERRA, AQUA). This presentation will demonstrate the capabilities of SIDAS-II to display and manipulate the aforementioned data sets, as well as perform a series of calculations/estimates from imagery using a man-machine interface. Among the interaction examples will be the SIDAS-II implementation of the Advanced Objective Dvorak Technique (AODT) from the University of Wisconsin/CIMSS.