The National Weather Service, Spaceflight Meteorology Group (SMG) supports NASA's human spaceflight program at Johnson Space Center. The main operational function is support of the Space Shuttle program by providing landing forecasts for the launch intact abort sites, on orbit primary landing site selection, and end of mission landings. Detailed forecasts are required for cloud cover, winds, visibility and turbulence as well as rain shower and thunderstorm proximity with respect to a specific runway. The main landing sites are located in Spain, France and the United States but the emergency landing sites cover the globe, requiring worldwide data sets.

SMG has local downlink capability for GOES East, GOES West and Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) data. All bands of the GOES and MSG data are ingested, in real time, into the SMG Man computer Interactive Data Access System (McIDAS). The data can be displayed as individual bands, multi-channel differencing imagery or as multi-channel color combinations. Digital imagery from several polar orbiting satellites is also available on McIDAS from various NESDIS and NASA servers.

The high resolution visible, infrared and water vapor MSG channels are put into a netCDF format on McIDAS and then sent via the Local Data Acquisition and Display (LDAD) system for display in the Advanced Weather Information Processing System (AWIPS). The SMG is also working on ingesting AWIPS-compatible Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data from the University of Wisconsin.

Each SMG forecast console provides access to both McIDAS and AWIPS displays. Extensive training occurred during 2007 to familiarize the SMG forecasters with the utility of the various bands individually and in combination. Operational use of multi-channel differencing and color combination imagery has increased. Examples will be shown from the most recently flown Space Shuttle missions.