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 system aspects of the expanded EDGE and its interface with the respective satellite data product 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.

The EDGE programs are java-based and cross-platform. They run as stand-alone programs and primarily display the selected data in a variety of ways defined by the user. The data sets from each respective platform are accessed as available and processed into binary orbital files which then serve as input for EDGEIS and NPROVS. The resulting NPROVS collocation dataset is comprised of the respective satellite orbital binary records containing the “single” sounding from each system that is collocated to a given radiosonde. These binary files are then transferred to PDISP on a daily basis for routine analysis and validation.

EDGEIS allows a given user the option of monitoring the orbital data including the specific products contained in NPROVS collocations (a good source for NPROVS troubleshooting). The output from NPROVS is available to PDISP as daily, weekly and monthly files. The PDISP analytical package includes numerous ‘sampling” option for analyzing and displaying collocations including by radiosonde instrument type, time period, radiosonde and satellite product QC, and other options discussed in the report. Vertical accuracy statistics of satellite minus ground truth differences and associated scatter plots are among the many analytical options available.