GOES-R Level 2 Products: Ground System Testing with Simulated Data

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) series R, S, T, U (GOES-R) is scheduled for initial launch in 2016 and will collect remote sensing data at a rate approximately 40 times larger than previous GOES missions over its 20-year operational lifecycle. GOES-R will provide advanced products based on government-developed Level 2 algorithms that describe the state of the atmosphere, land, and oceans over the Western Hemisphere. The Harris GOES-R Team has developed and delivered to NOAA a robust and flexible Ground System (GS) to produce and distribute these data products subject to user-specified latency requirements. This approach uses High Performance Computing (HPC) within a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to generate remote sensing products by ingesting and combining data from multiple sources. Test results show that the system meets the latency and availability requirements for all products while retaining the scientific quality of the government-provided algorithms. In this presentation, we focus on the new Level 2+ algorithms that use sensor data from the GOES-R Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) and the Global Lightning Mapper (GLM). We give a comprehensive view of the ABI and GLM Level 2 products generated by the Ground System, with consideration for the operational configuration and precedence chain. For each algorithm, we present a detailed analysis of the product validity of the end products, diagnostic products, and product metadata. Our acceptance process also includes comparisons with government-supplied expected outputs using simulated data for the ABI and GLM. Finally, we summarize the current state of the ABI and GLM Level 2 algorithms and products, as preparation for future testing, which includes the Calibration / Validation effort after launch.