MetEd Satellite Education Resources for GOES-R, S-NPP and JPSS User Readiness

The COMET® Program (www.comet.ucar.edu) is funded by NOAA NESDIS, EUMETSAT, and the Meteorological Service of Canada to support education and training in satellite meteorology. COMET's satellite education programs focus 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 offerings that are helping users prepare for the arrival of data and products from the next-generation GOES-R+ and JPSS satellite series. The GOES-R lessons address improvements that the GOES-R ABI imager and Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) will bring to decision support, short-term forecasting, numerical weather prediction, and environmental monitoring. S-NPP and JPSS polar orbiter lessons cover advances in nighttime visible observation, atmospheric sounding, and many other applications that benefit from the VIIRS imager's 22 visible and infrared bands.

The presentation will also briefly highlight other recently published lessons in the areas of aviation meteorology, tropical mesoscale convective systems, cyclogenesis, atmospheric composition, atmospheric dust, atmospheric rivers, and other phenomena. It will also describe projects that are either under development or planned.

Over 70 satellite-focused, self-paced, online materials are freely available on the Meted Web site via the “Education & Training/Satellite” topic area. In additional to English, a number of lessons are also available in Spanish and French. GOES-R, S-NPP and JPSS relevant information can also be found on the the Environmental Satellite Resource Center (ESRC) Web site (www.meted.ucar.edu/esrc) that is maintained by COMET. The ESRC is a searchable, database-driven Web site that provides access to nearly 600 education, training, and informational resources on Earth observation satellites.