NOAA's Transition to Operations of NDE S-NPP Products

The launch of NOAA's Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite in October 2011 has brought opportunities for meteorological, oceanic, terrestrial, cryogenic, and climate users to utilize new and enhanced environmental, sensor, and temperature data records. NOAA's NPP Data Exploitation (NDE) system, situated within the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Services (NESDIS) Environmental Satellite Processing Center (ESPC), is the data processing system that serves near-real time S-NPP data to the civilian operational user community. A product generation tool within NDE enables the system to tailor data records to better meet user requirements such as alternative data formats, aerial coverages, frequencies and map projections. NDE also has the ability to apply science algorithms to S-NPP data records to generate additional unique atmospheric, oceanic, and land surface products required by NOAA's users.

Prior to NDE formally being transitioned over to the ESPC operations, an initial set of NDE test products are being made available to the National Weather Service (NWS) and other numerical weather prediction centers. These test products include Binary Universal Form for the Representation of meteorological data (BUFR) formatted atmospheric radiances generated from observations taken from the microwave (ATMS) and infrared (CrIS) instruments and also selected imagery (VIIRS) over the Alaskan domain. Near-term future products to be made available by NDE will include polar winds, green vegetation fraction, snow/ice, atmospheric soundings, carbon, stability, and hydro-meteorological products. This paper will describe the status of the transition of NDE products to operations.