The NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) mission scheduled to launch in 2009 will provide a first look at a new generation of products from U.S. operational polar orbiting Earth observing satellites. Production of Sensor Data Record (SDR) and Environmental Data Record (EDR) products will be accomplished by the Interface Data Processing Segment (IDPS) of the NPOESS Ground System. The NASA NPP Science Team has been tasked with evaluation of the operational products from the IDPS within a facility known as the Science Data Segment (SDS). Within the SDS, NASA has established five Product and Evaluation and Test Elements (PEATEs) to enable the NPP Science Team to efficiently and effectively evaluate the operational SDRs and EDRs from NPP. The PEATEs are organized into categories including Atmosphere, Land, Ocean, Ozone and Sounder. The Atmosphere PEATE has been established within the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Atmosphere PEATE assists the NPP Science Team in: (a) evaluating the suitability of the NPP Atmosphere EDRs for continuing the climate record; (b) validating NPP Atmosphere EDRs against ground-based and satellite-based measurements; (c) developing improved or alternative Atmosphere NPP EDR algorithms. The Atmosphere PEATE allows the NPP Science Team to rapidly assess the climate quality of the NPP atmosphere algorithms in the pre-launch period using proxy data including MODIS, AIRS, and IASI, and validation data from ground based, aircraft, and satellite sources including CALIPSO and CloudSat.

The Atmosphere PEATE provides a Science Processing System (SPS) to enable the NPP Science Team to rapidly evaluate climatologically significant datasets from proxy sources pre-launch and NPP post-launch. The SPS leverages knowledge and expertise from the NPP Ocean and Land PEATE processing systems, and is deployed at SSEC on commodity compute and storage hardware running Linux. The SPS will allow the NPP Science Team to evaluate one year of global NPP cloud EDRs using Aqua MODIS proxy data by the end of 2007. It will also allow the cloud EDRs to be compared to CALIPSO and CloudSat validation data, and ground based cloud products. The NPP cloud EDRs will be generated using the latest available versions of the operational (OPS) codes provided by the NPP instrument contractors.