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 satellites 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 JPSS Common Ground System (JPSS CGS), and consists primarily of a Command, Control, and Communications Segment (C3S), 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 NPP, JPSS and DWSS satellite data to provide environmental data products to NOAA and DoD processing centers operated by the United States government. NOAA's Center for Satellite Applications & Research (STAR) is responsible for the algorithms that produce the EDRs, including their quality aspects.

This presentation will illustrate and describe the JPSS CGS provided capabilities in support of IDPS Product Generation. This discussion will include sections on algorithms and products, algorithms processing chain workflow, product dissemination, data-processing software framework and hardware descriptions to meet latency, mission data availability, and mission data quality requirements.

The IDPS is responsible for receiving raw mission data from the C3S and for creating and delivering useable environmental products to the Centrals. While currently operationally sized to process up for the NPP mission data, its flexible design allows easy expansion to handle more JPSS/DWSS satellites, lower latency and additional missions.

The IDPS accepts data from the C3S Data Handling Node (DHN) and produces, stores, and delivers RDRs, TDRs, SDRs, IPs, ARPs, and EDRs to external end users. These users include the NESDIS, AFWA, FNMOC, and NAVO Centrals, CLASS, and the SDS (currently NPP satellite data only). The IDPS also delivers data to several internal users, including the NPOESS Science-Led Investigation Processing System (NSIPS) and the Payload Support Tool (PST). An IDP resides at each Central and consists of the complete hardware/software suite required to produce all JPSS CGS data products within specified latencies. The sizing of this hardware varies according to the number of processed SMD data streams and the differing JPSS State latency requirements. For State 1, where only NPP data are processed, the hardware sizing handles the NPP sensors sufficiently. During State 2 and beyond, the hardware sizing is sufficient to process at least two simultaneous spacecraft downlinks. The hardware has sufficient resources for an operational component (or Ops string) and an Integration and Test (I&T) string. Sizing for the Ops string enables the generation of all products in the required latencies, with the I&T string sized to support on-site integration, test, checkout, off-line investigations, and provide Algorithm Support Capability (ASC) for the Central users. Each Central can specify the data products to be delivered and substitute ancillary data sets for the generation of those products. The IDPS operators can rapidly tailor the system by changing the data processing configuration guides.