CIRA Proving Ground Activities in Preparation for the GOES-R Era

The next generation Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) environmental satellite systems, beginning with GOES-R, will contain a number of advanced instruments including the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI). GOES-R ABI will not only provide much higher spatial and temporal resolution imagery, but will also have 16 imager bands, versus five in the current GOES.

The GOES-R Proving Ground provides for an opportunity for National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters and other operational users of satellite data to be introduced to and trained properly on these new GOES-R capabilities in order to maximize the utility of GOES-R for these users. It also provides for operational forecasters to have an impact on the products they will see after GOES-R has been launched (end of 2015). The GOES-R Proving Ground was created to ensure that the most useful of these products actually gets into operations. The key to accomplishing this task is to emulate potential GOES-R products so that forecasters can provide feedback to developers before the satellite is launched. An additional benefit to the operational community is training on products and more familiarity with new capabilities and products so that they can be utilized fully as soon as they become operationally available. The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) is one of three partners that work closely with WFOs within the GOES-R Proving Ground, with the others being the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) and NASA's Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Program. These three organizations engage in developing new products that demonstrate the capabilities of GOES-R, and are testing these prototypes with operational forecasters. CIRA has been interacting closely on GOES-R product evaluations with NWS Weather Service Offices and National Centers for over four years. In this presentation we will give an update on CIRA's current Proving Ground efforts, including a discussion of the latest products being tested and the feedback we have received. As the launch of the first GOES-R satellite is approaching, we will also discuss CIRA's involvement in the training process, especially through the connections via VISIT (Virtual Institute for Satellite Integration Training) and SHyMet (Satellite Hydrology and Meteorology).