The Calibration/Validation Strategy for GOES-R

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series (GOES-R) will be the next generation of NOAA geostationary environmental satellites.  The first satellite in the series is planned to be launched in November 2016.  The satellite will carry six instruments dedicated to the study of the Earth’s weather (ABI), lightning mapping (GLM), solar observations (EXIS and SUVI), and space weather monitoring (MAG and SEISS).  The product calibration/validation plans for these six instruments were created to advance the products to a well-characterized state following an aggressive maturity schedule.  In this talk, we give an overview of this strategy.

The calibration/validation strategy requires the involvement of many teams, each with their own roles.  The teams utilize a wide variety of tools and data sources.  A change management plan allows for algorithm updates as desired, either to fix a discrepancy, update a look-up table, or to add new capabilities.  The readiness of these teams, the tools and data they use, and their testing schema have been coordinated and tracked to ensure they are necessary and sufficient to validate the post-launch product performance.