NPP Environmental Products

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are jointly acquiring the next-generation civilian weather and environmental satellite system: the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). JPSS will contribute the afternoon orbit component and ground processing system of the restructured National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). As such, JPSS replaces the current Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) managed by NOAA and the ground processing component of both POES and the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) replacement, known as the Defense Weather Satellite System (DWSS), managed by the Department of Defense (DoD). The JPSS satellite will carry a suite of sensors designed to collect meteorological, oceanographic, climatological, and solar-geophysical observations of the earth, atmosphere, and space. The ground processing system for JPSS is known as the Common Ground System (JPSS CGS), and consists of a Command, Control, and Communications Segment (C3S), the Interface Data Processing Segment (IDPS) and the Field Terminal Segment (FTS). All three segments are developed by Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems (IIS). The IDPS will process JPSS and DWSS satellite data to provide environmental data products (aka, Environmental Data Records or EDRs) to NOAA and DoD processing centers operated by the United States government. The IDPS will process EDRs beginning with the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) and continue through the lifetime of the JPSS and DWSS systems. Under NPOESS, the Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems Algorithms and Data Products (A&DP) organization was responsible for the algorithms that produce the EDRs, including their quality aspects. For JPSS, that responsibility has transferred to NOAA's Center for Satellite Applications & Research (STAR).

Given a launch date for the NPP spacecraft on the near horizon and the need for users to become familiar with NPP environmental products, this paper will provide an overview of all the products generated by the IDPS and provided to NOAA's Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System (CLASS) for public distribution. It will discuss each of the 25 NPP EDRs in detail, including a description of the EDR, its size, coverage, and expected uses.