Meteorological Satellite Training Workshops – From Theory to Application

University of Wisconsin – Madison scientists teach polar orbiter meteorological satellite training workshops in order to promote the use of directly downlinked satellite data for the enhancement of environmental forecasting and decision making, and to foster the next generation of remote sensing scientists. The courses focus on the use of locally acquired directly downlinked data and products from organizations who manage X- and L- Band antennas around the world. The 3-5 day courses include morning overviews of the satellite instruments and products, allowing the students to become familiar with the data and theory behind the standard land, ocean and atmosphere science products that can be created using free NASA and NOAA software, and the strengths and weaknesses of each one.  The NASA International MODIS/AIRS Processing Package (IMAPP) and the NOAA Community Satellite Processing Package (CSPP) are a set of software that support the creation of calibrated and navigated data, as well and science products and images from polar orbiter satellite data.  The software is designed to be easy to install and use, and source code is available for most products. Each course day afternoon consists of hands on lab exercises using the free IMAPP/CSPP HYDRA software tool where students explore local data sets and applications of interest utilizing information described in the morning sessions. The final day of the workshop consists of student presentations describing a local investigation on a topic of their choice. In summary, these are hands-on, practical courses focused on teaching the student environmental decision making skills based on remote sensing data. To date, 12 workshops have been taught on 6 continents including students from more than 60 countries, working in coordination with IEEE Geosciences and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).   All course lectures, labs, datasets and software utilized during the course are freely distributed through the polar orbiter workshop website:   http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/dbs/ .