With collaboration from the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA), the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Monterey, CA provides near real time satellite products on a public domain website “NexSat”, under the auspices of the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Integrated Program Office (IPO). NexSat serves as an educational resource for understanding and interpreting satellite imagery using current and future sensors. To attract more customers, NexSat is expanding its global coverage, providing more value-added image products, and enhancing its imagery formatting to include Google Earth viewing. The result of these improvements has led toward a significant increase of user ‘hits', particularly within countries south of the continental US. A sampling of NexSat customers include government agencies, educational institutions throughout the Americas, US military, TV weathercasters, severe storm/hurricane trackers, recreational users, county planners, pilots, vintners, fire fighting personnel, to name a few. Additionally, the operational aspects of NexSat is being exploited by a number of field programs: the Canadian CloudSat/CALIPSO Validation Project (C3VP), Seven-Seas Global Intelligence Group (7SEAS), Physics of Stratocumulus clouds (POST), Tropical Cyclone Structure in the Western Pacific (TCS08).

The primary focus of NexSat is to introduce the general public to the capabilities of the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor during the upcoming NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) and NPOESS eras. NexSat demonstrates VIIRS by applying current ‘heritage sensors' such as the NOAA's Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Orbview's Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS), and DMSP's Operational Line Scan (OLS). Since the MODIS sensor most closely simulates VIIRS, the majority of NexSat products are processed from this sensor. NexSat also provides products derived from ‘non-heritage' sensors that include geostationary (GOES, METEOSAT and MTSAT) platforms.

This presentation will showcase a sampling of the products within NexSat as well as describe outreach and training efforts via NexSat. The goal is to promote NexSat as a “one-stop shop” for current and future satellite products.