COMET's Environmental Satellite Education Resources for Anticipating and Monitoring of Meteorological Hazards

The COMET^® Program (www.comet.ucar.edu), a part of the UCAR Community Programs, receives funding from NOAA NESDIS as well as EUMETSAT and the Meteorological Service of Canada to support education and training in satellite meteorology. These partnerships enable COMET to create educational materials of global interest on polar-orbiting and geostationary remote sensing platforms.

Over the last several years, COMET's satellite education programs have focused on the capabilities and applications of current and next-generation operational polar-orbiting and geostationary satellites and their relevance to operational forecasters and other user communities. By partnering with experts from the Naval Research Laboratory, NOAA-NESDIS and its Cooperative Institutes, Meteorological Service of Canada, EUMETSAT, and other user communities, COMET stimulates greater use of current and future satellite observations and products.

This presentation provides an overview of COMET's satellite training and education efforts with applications for forecasting and monitoring hazardous events and their environments. We will highlight existing online lessons that cover remote sounding of the atmosphere for anticipating severe storms; monitoring of atmospheric moisture for forecasting potential flash flooding events; monitoring of wildland fires, antecedent and post-burn vegetation conditions; monitoring of potentially severe convection, tropical cyclones and their environment; monitoring of atmospheric dust storms and volcanic ash; monitoring of trace gases and pollutants with potential impacts on human health; and monitoring of environmental conditions that help forecasters anticipate regional weather trends and events due to both short and long term climate variability such as the El Nino/La Nina cycle.

Over 60 satellite-focused self-paced online materials are freely available via the Satellite Topic area of the MetEd Web site (www.meted.ucar.edu/topics/modules/satellite) and COMET's Environmental Satellite Resource Center (ESRC) Web site (www.meted.ucar.edu/esrc). The ESRC is a searchable, database-driven Web site that provides access to nearly 600 education, training, and informational resources on Earth-observing satellites. The ESRC is available outside COMET's registration system for easy access.