The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NOAA/NESDIS) produces global temperature and moisture soundings from several polar-orbiting and geostationary satellites. Within NOAA/NESDIS, the respective product projects provide routine monitoring, development, and validation support which for the Advanced-TOVS (ATOVS) included the Environmental Data and Graphical Evaluation (EDGE) analytical interface. These activities were recently integrated into a NOAA centralized function to validate and compare satellite derived sounding products from multiple products platforms including ATOVS, Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), Microwave Integrated Retrieval System (MIRS), GOES, Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI), and Constellation Observing System for Meteorology Ionosphere and Climate (COSMIC), referred to as Noaa PROducts (integrated) Validation System (NPROVS) and which includes an expanded EDGE to analyze and display the respective platform observations.

The following report presents science aspects of the expanded EDGE capability to provide detailed and useful scientific analysis of the respective satellite product data (orbital) platforms and resulting NPROVS datasets consisting of collocated satellite, radiosonde, and associated NWP observations. EDGE consists of two main sub-systems; the EDGE Imaging System (EDGEIS) which displays global fields of sequential (and gridded) satellite orbital data (or in the case of GOES the hourly CONUS data) from the respective data platforms, and the ProfileDisplay (PDISP) which displays and analyzes the respective vertical profiles of collocated satellite, ground truth (radiosonde), and NWP observations compiled by NPROVS.

EDGE allows a given user the option of monitoring the respective orbital data from each of the satellite product system (including collocated NWP data as available) and/or the NPROVS collocation datasets which contain the individual collocations of the respective satellite systems to a given ground-truth (radiosondes). This combined orbital and collocated observation analytical tool provides a complete scientific monitoring, system troubleshooting, and consistent multiple satellite and ground truth data platform comparison capability. Orbital data are available within hours of observations with the output from NPROVS available within 12 to 48 hours as daily, weekly and monthly files. EDGEIS and PDISP contain multiple display options allowing users to visualize specific observations, regions, pressure levels, and the original data records. PDISP has undergone extensive recent expansions including revised “sampling” options for analyzing and displaying collocations including by satellite system, radiosonde site, instrument type, time, region, QC parameter ( radiosonde and/or respective satellite), and other options discussed in the report. The recently deployed capability to compute vertical accuracy statistics of respective satellite minus ground truth differences and associated scatter plots within a given analytical session are among the more powerful analytical tools available.

NPROVS (and EDGE) has been identified as a prototype for the development of operational QC protocols in conjunction with the planned NPOESS level 2 product systems.