Research-to-Operations Planning for CLARREO: You Can Never Start Too Soon

The 2008 National Research Council report, Ensuring the Climate Record from the NPOESS and GOES-R Spacecraft: Elements of a Strategy to Recover Measurement Capabilities Lost in Program Restructuring, states that "a long-term climate strategy must provide for the essential characterization, calibration, stability, continuity, and data systems required to support climate applications." The Climate Absolute Radiance And Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) mission is being designed to address key elements of this challenge.

NASA and NOAA share responsibility for CLARREO. The NOAA component involves the research-to-operations (R-to-O) continuity of the critical climate measurements of incident solar irradiance and the Earth energy budget by flying the Total Solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS) and the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) sensors.

The NASA portion of CLARREO addresses the challenge of calibration accuracy and the need to rigorously observe climate change on decade time scales and to use decadal change observations as the most critical method to determine the accuracy of climate change projections. The CLARREO mission accomplishes this through highly accurate decadal change observations traceable on-orbit to SI standards for knowledge of uncertainty and comparison with future measurements.

In addition, CLARREO's set of reference infrared and reflected solar spectrometers in orbit are capable of improving NOAA's and other operational systems by establishing the traceability to on-orbit standards which is essential for the interoperability, consistency, and accuracy of the global earth observation system of systems.

Due to the decadal scale goals of CLARREO, important aspects of a successful R-to-O transition such as affordability, sustainability, and reproducibility while maintaining high accuracy and SI traceability are being considered during mission formulation. This presentation will summarize the planned CLARREO observations, science priorities and requirements, and the baseline mission architecture. Current R-to-O planning for NOAA's part of CLARREO and R-to-O considerations for potential future CLARREO follow-on missions will be highlighted.