The National Weather Service Spaceflight Meteorology Group (SMG) supports NASA's human spaceflight program at Johnson Space Center. Currently, 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. The main landing sites are located in Spain, France and the United States but the emergency landing sites cover the globe. Worldwide data sets are also required for daily forecasts of 15 possible Soyuz emergency landing sites. Whereas today the majority of the landing sites are on land, for the future Constellation program, both the abort and nominal end-of-mission landing sites are planned as water landings. Such data sparse water landings will increase the dependence on datasets such as satellite data.

The SMG directly ingests, or has access to, a wide variety of satellite datasets that are not part of the standard Advanced Weather Information Processing System (AWIPS) NOAAport broadcast. This includes local real-time ingest for all bands of GOES East, GOES West and Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) data into the SMG Man computer Interactive Data Access System (McIDAS). Select MSG channels are processed for display on AWIPS. Imagery from NOAA polar orbiting satellites and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, as well as imagery products, can also be accessed on McIDAS from NESDIS and NASA servers. In addition, the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies and NASA's Short-term Prediction Research and Transition Center send imagery and imagery products to SMG. The SMG is also creating multispectral products locally, such as an MSG fog product.

Add to that, Web sites such as the U.S. Navy's NexSat and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites that make available GOES-R type products, as well as the United States Air Force Web sites accessing worldwide data, and the operational forecaster has almost an overwhelming amount of imagery to look at on a variety of disparate computer systems. With the wealth of imagery and products comes a large training curve to be able to understand the data. Integrating data into AWIPS requires personnel that have the time and expertise for processing the data into formats that can be ingested and navigated by AWIPS. However, these data must be easily accessible on our operational computer systems in order to be fully utilized. Data examples and the associated challenges of using the data will be discussed.