An overview of CIRA's contribution to the GOES-R Proving Ground

CIRA is an active member of the GOES-R Proving Ground project, along with two other Proving Ground product developers, the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) and NASA's Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Program. These three organizations engage in developing new products that demonstrate the capabilities of the future GOES-R satellites, and test prototypes of these new products with operational forecasters. A key goal of the GOES-R Proving Ground is to bridge the gap between the developers and end users for the purposes of training, product evaluation, and solicitation of user feedback. The concept of the Proving Ground is that this type of interaction will enable the most effective products to be developed that will be useful to operational forecasters as soon as GOES-R data is available.

CIRA's initial Proving Ground interaction with NWS forecasters focused on the two closest National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs), at Boulder, Colorado and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Over the last couple of years we have expanded our interactions to other WFOs as opportunities have arisen. In this presentation we will show some of our Proving Ground products and discuss our interactions with the WFOs. We will also address the challenges we have encountered, especially in the area of forecaster feedback. Plans will be outlined for future products and interactions, incorporating ideas from the most recent GOES-R Proving Ground Annual Meeting in Boulder in May 2010.