Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) Environmental Products

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 replace the afternoon orbit component and ground processing system of the current Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) managed by NOAA. 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 Common Ground System (JPSS CGS), and provides command, control, and communications (C3) and data processing and product delivery. As a multi-mission system, CGS provides combinations of C3, data processing, and product delivery for numerous NASA, NOAA, Department of Defense (DoD), and international missions, such as NASA's Earth Observation System (EOS), NOAA's current POES, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Global Change Observation Mission – Water (GCOM-W1), and DoD's Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP).

The first satellite in the JPSS constellation, known as the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite, was launched on 28 October 2011, and is currently undergoing product calibration and validation activities. CGS's data processing capability will process the satellite data from JPSS satellites to provide environmental data products (including Sensor Data Records (SDRs) and Environmental Data Records (EDRs)) to NOAA and DoD processing centers operated by the United States government, as well as NOAA's Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System (CLASS). CGS is currently processing and delivering SDRs and EDRs for Suomi NPP and will continue through the lifetime of the JPSS program. Given that public release of Suomi NPP satellite products, including EDRs, will be forthcoming over the next few months and the need for users to become familiar with these products, this presentation will provide an overview of all the products generated by the CGS and provided to CLASS for public distribution. It will discuss each of the 25 Suomi NPP EDRs, as well as their associated geolocation information, in detail, including a description of the EDR, its size, coverage, and expected uses.