The Arctic Composite Imagery (ACI) Project is created at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison). The ACI were originally developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with inspiration from work at the Antarctic Meteorological Research and Data Center (AMRDC) at UW-Madison with its development of Antarctic composite imagery with support from the National Science Foundation. In the early 2010s, a transition of the ACI product began from UW-Madison to the NOAA/NESDIS Office of Satellite and Product Operations (OSPO) to primarily support operations in NOAA's Ocean Prediction Center (OPC) and secondarily National Weather Service Alaska, Weather Prediction Center, and National Ice Center. The ACI include the latest geostationary and polar orbiting satellite data centered over the North Pole and covering the Arctic region to ~50˚ N. Five channels of imagery are created hourly: infrared, longwave, shortwave, visible, and water vapor. This presentation will cover the history of ACI, the production at CIMSS in support of operations at OSPO and other NOAA entities, and describe the latest updates to ACI that CIMSS is researching. Some of these updates include exploration of red-green-blue (RGB) composites, adding new satellites to the composites such as the MetOp-SG data, and server and code management to maintain consistent production of ACI.
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