92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Monday, 23 January 2012: 11:15 AM
Current Status and Future Plan of Korea Meteorological Satellite Program (invited)
Room 245 (New Orleans Convention Center )
Ae-Sook Suh, National Meteorological Satellite Center/Korea Meteorological Administration, Jincheon-gun, Chungbuk, South Korea; and D. Kim, J. D. Park, and S. Yoon

Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) has been developed Meteorological Satellite program since 2003 and successfully launched first Korean geostationary weather satellite - Communication, Ocean, and Meteorological Satellite (COMS) on June 26, 2010. Korea became the world's 7th nation to possess an independent meteorological satellite now.

COMS produces full disk imagery every 3 hours and extended Northern Hemisphere imagery every 15 minutes. In particular, COMS has been focusing on the Korean Peninsula 8 times an hour to expect early detect of abrupt high-impact weather events such as typhoons and summertime heavy rains which frequency increase by a factor of 4 compared with the past. MEARI, the 5th typhoon in 2011, is the good example of well applied COMS high temporal data.

COMS Meteorological Data Processing System (CMDPS) provides 16 baseline products including information on Atmospheric motion vector, Asian dust, sea surface temperature and land surface temperature over the East Asian region. These products will help improve the performance of NWP models for weather analysis and forecast. In the long term, they will be used in the analysis and prediction of climate change around the Asian region.

From April 1 2011, KMA starts to provide COMS data to the countries in the Asia Pacific region for free and actively deploys the satellite receiving system support project for the countries in Southeast Asia to improve the utilization of COMS data. In particular, KMA/NMSC has been providing a training program for about one month for the forecasters and satellite imaging analysis experts in the Asia Pacific region including the Philippines, Vietnam, Mongolia and Papua New Guinea every year since 2007.

COMS follow-on satellite development program will kick-off on 2012. The COMS follow-on consists of a pair of satellites for multi-purpose. One is for meteorological mission only (COMS-2A) and the other is for oceanographic and environmental mission (COMS-2B). The COMS-2A will be scheduled to be launched in 2017. KMA is considering a meteorological instrument comparable to the ABI (GOES-R) or FCI (MTG) as follows: - Multi-channel capacity : 16 channels (including 2-3 visible channels) - Spatial resolution : 0.5 km for visible channels and 2 km for infrared channels - Fast imaging : less than 10 minutes for Full Disk observation - Flexibility for the regional area selection and scheduling

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