Planning and Opportunities for Community Participation in the NPP Measurement Validation Activities

The NPP spacecraft is fully populated with 5 sensors to provide data continuity for the EOS MODIS, AIRS/AMSU, OMI and CERES missions into the operational observing program of NOAA. The spacecraft launch date is set to be within the year. The NPP Science Teams have been planning product validation measurement comparisons for nearly 3 years now, and are presently in our final tune-up for our at-launch and early on-orbit validation strategies. Our approaches have recently been reviewed within the international CEOS community for the optical sensors. We will briefly describe our product measurement suite, and will review our current alignment of correlative measurements intended for validation of these products; however, final planning of validation measurements still allows for add of important validation observations. The review of these measurement products is intended to open an opportunity to the community to identify useful mature and up-coming measurements and validation strategies to extend the NPP product validation activities. Validation data in areas that corresponding to environmental conditions where satellite data retrievals are particularly complex is one example of where continuing identification of correlative measurements may assist in moving the product validation activities forward for the NPP and Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Programs.