Arctic Weather Every 10 Minutes: Design and Operation of ABI for PCW

This presentation will discuss the key weather observation performance objectives for the Canadian Polar Communication and Weather (PCW) mission and how they drive the design and operation of a PCW imager.

The decreasing ice in the Arctic is leading to more personnel, ships, and operations, resulting in a greater need for more accurate, timely weather predictions. The US, Japanese, Korean, and European meteorological agencies are all upgrading their geostationary weather imagers to provide much more frequent Full Disk Earth images (every 5 to 10 minutes). Arctic weather observation, however, is still limited to a few passes a day from low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, many of which are well beyond their intended operational life.

The Canadian Polar Communication and Weather (PCW) mission concept is to provide Arctic weather observations with the same temporal fidelity and spectral resolution as equatorial and mid-latitude weather and similar spatial resolution. This presentation will discuss how the key performance objectives drive the design and operation of a PCW imager. Key mission decisions include number of satellites, orbit (LEO vs. HEO; Molniya, TAP, Tundra), coverage, image collection interval, types of images (Full Disk, storm watch, etc.), spectral bands, spatial resolution, etc.

Exelis' Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) will fly on GOES-R East, GOES-R West, Himawari (Japan), and GEO-KOMPSAT-2A (Korea), providing these missions the additional capability for interleaved mesoscales delivering storm observations every 30 to 60 seconds. ABI's operational flexibility also makes it an ideal solution for the PCW mission.