NASA's Short-Term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center: A Paradigm for Transitioning Research into Operations

The Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) project at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL is a NASA- and NOAA-funded activity to transition experimental/quasi-operational satellite observations and modeling capabilities to the operational weather community to improve short-term weather forecasts on a regional and local scale. The project continues to expand on its suite of unique products, building additional collaborations and partnerships, and conducting innovative research to address specific weather forecast challenges and benefit operational activities in the NOAA/National Weather Service (NWS) and the disaster response community. End users include NWS Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs), NWS/National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) National Centers, other government agencies, and private sector partners.

Originally working with partners in the southeastern United States, over the last ten years, SPoRT has seen an expansion of data products that support new collaborating partners. Now, SPoRT has active collaborations with more than 30 WFOs in all 6 NWS regions and multiple NCEP National Centers. SPoRT works collaboratively with university partners to obtain real-time data and engage the research community in the development of new experimental products. Over this time, SPoRT has sharpened a successful research-to-operations/operations-to-research (R2O/O2R) paradigm that enables the project and its partners and collaborators to provide products that are needed and can be readily used in an operational environment. Keys to this paradigm are active collaboration and communication with end users, formatting experimental data sets for view in end-user decision support systems, creating training materials focused on user needs and applications, and obtaining end-user feedback on the forecaster confidence and operational impact of experimental products.

This abstract highlights SPoRT’s R2O/O2R paradigm and recent accomplishments related to the areas of remote sensing, modeling and data assimilation, and total lightning as examples to illustrate this paradigm in action. The abstract will also discuss the next phase of the SPoRT project that includes transitioning data from upcoming NASA sensors to our current NWS partners but also expansion of current satellite and modeling capabilities to support new partners in other government agencies and the private sector.