STAR JPSS EDR Long-Term Monitoring Site Implementation

Long-term quality monitoring of satellite products is an important part of the satellite data calibration/validation effort. This is true of both the sensor level products, and the derived products. Over the past five years, the NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) has created an extensive system for monitoring the quality and health of Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Sensor Data Records – the Integrated Calibration/Validation System (ICVS). The strongly positive reception for ICVS has lead STAR to extend this system to cover Environmental Data Records (EDR) in a new site – the EDR Long-Term Monitoring (LTM) Site.

The EDR LTM Site is the first of its kind site to offer a single website to view near real time quality and availability and long term trending for all of the EDR products produced under the STAR JPSS banner. The site takes the best practices already used by many of the individual EDR teams in monitoring their own products, and applies them consistently to all of the products, to create a uniform set of standards for displaying and monitoring JPSS EDRs.

Phase 1 of the project, which was completed in July 2016, offers a daily global overview of the products for all 18 EDR product groups with STAR JPSS. The goal of this phase is to offer a quick look for users and downstream product developers to quickly assess product availability and potential sources of error. This phase also allowed for the creation of a framework and a common set of presentation standards for all EDR teams to use.

Phase 2, which began in August 2016, will focus on showing near real time measures of product quality, such as maps of quality flags or percentage of the cases in a day that meet the specifications. Comparisons to similar products from other satellite systems and ground truth will be included. The site will also show trending of the performance and other statistics of product quality. The full system will be in place for the 2017 launch of JPSS-1 and will to allow product developers and users quickly identify and rectify potential errors in EDR products. The EDR LTM site, together with the ICVS, provides end to end quality monitoring of the data products generated from the JPSS satellites.