COMET’s MetEd Education and Training Resources for GOES-R and JPSS User Readiness

The COMET® Program (www.comet.ucar.edu), a part of the UCAR Community Programs (UCP), is funded by NOAA NESDIS as well as EUMETSAT and the Meteorological Service of Canada to develop and deliver education and training in satellite meteorology. Many of COMET’s satellite educational activities focus on developing web-based materials that highlight the capabilities and applications of current and next-generation geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites. These self-paced online lessons are freely available via the MetEd website (meted.ucar.edu) to help learners prepare for and exploit satellite advancements, and to demonstrate the relevance of new products to operational forecasters and other user communities. Nearly 100 satellite-focused, self-paced, online lessons are accessible via the direct topic link http://www.meted.ucar.edu/topics/satellite. Many of these lessons are also available in Spanish, French and other languages, making learning resources more accessible to a larger international audience.

This presentation will highlight educational offerings directly applicable to preparing users for the capabilities of the S-NPP and JPSS satellite series as well as the newly operational GOES-16 satellite. For JPSS, this includes the JPSS Satellites: Capabilities and Applications distance learning course available on MetEd, the recently updated lesson on using the VIIRS Day Night Band, and several COMET-produced short lessons for the National Weather Service’s Satellite Foundation Course for JPSS (SatFC-J) that introduce instrument capabilities and applications. For GOES-16, we’ll review efforts to update existing lessons for the National Weather Service Satellite Foundational Course for GOES-R/-16 (SatFC-G) as well as COMET’s more in-depth GOES-R/-16 focused lessons available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese that introduce the full GOES-R satellite, the ABI imager, and the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM). All users of satellite data and products can exploit MetEd’s GOES and JPSS learning resources to gain exposure to the improvements these technologies bring to decision support, short-term forecasting, numerical weather prediction, and environmental monitoring.

The presentation will conclude with an overview of additional satellite educational activities including ongoing and future work.