Demonstrating S-NPP VIIRS Imagery via Naval Research Laboratory Satellite Websites

Since the launch of the S-NPP satellite in October 2011, the Naval Research Laboratory, Marine Meteorology Division in Monterey, CA (NRL-MRY) has been developing and providing the global community with VIIRS-derived state of the art products on four operational websites: • NexSat: (www.nrlmry.navy.mil/NEXSAT.html) • NRL-MRY VIIRS: (www.nrlmry.navy.mil/VIIRS.html) • NRL-MRY Tropical Cyclone Page: (www.nrlmry.navy.mil/TC.html)

These user-friendly websites are accessed by the global public with a daily average of 250,000 and 310,000 web hits for NexSat and Tropical Cyclone websites, respectively. Users consist of operational, research, scientific field campaigns, academia, and weather enthusiasts. To supplement VIIRS, the websites contain ancillary products from 32 other sensors (5 geostationary, 27 low earth orbiting) ranging from visible through microwave channels. NRL-MRY also leverages the NRL global and regional numerical weather prediction (NWP) models for assessing cloud top measurements and synoptic overlays. Thanks to our collaborations with the Direct Readout sites at CIMSS along with the AFWA IDPS-FNMOC and NOAA IDPS portals, a robust component to our websites are product latencies that typically satisfy operational time constraints necessary for planning purposes, including daily weather briefs, typhoon and hurricane tracking, or a variety of disaster relief monitoring activities. Given these resources, NRL-MRY acquires ~2TBytes of data and produces 100,000 image products on a daily basis. In partnership with the COMET program, our product tutorials contain simple and graphically enhanced descriptions that accommodate users ranging from basic to advanced understanding of satellite meteorology.

This presentation will provide a basic overview of our website functionality, including animations, co-registered formats, and Google Earth viewing. We will also display imagery examples, featuring VIIRS-derived products that demonstrate the superiority of VIIRS against its heritage sensor counterparts. A focal aspect will be the demonstration of the VIIRS Day Night Band (DNB) in detecting nighttime features such as wildfires, volcanic ash, Arctic sea ice, and tropical cyclones. We also plan to illustrate how NexSat and NRL-MRY VIIRS demonstrate CAL/VAL activity such as ocean color chlorophyll products. We will also discuss outreach and training efforts designed for research and operational applications. Our goal is to encourage the audience to add our URLs into their suite of web-based satellite resources.