Validation of GOES-16 Atmospheric Precipitable Water and Instability Indices Products for Operational Applications

The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) board the next generation of GOES satellite (GOES-16, the first of GOES-R series), launched on 19 November 2016, has fine temporal (30 seconds – 15 minutes) and spatial resolutions (0.5 – 2 km), and 16 spectral bands. GOES-16 starts a new era for geostationary satellite observing, however, due to the lack of an infrared (IR) sounder, the ABI is used to continue the legacy atmospheric profile (LAP) products which include the legacy atmospheric moisture profile, legacy atmospheric temperature profile, total precipitable water, layered precipitable water, and derived atmospheric stability indices. The GOES-R series ABI LAP algorithms have been developed under the GOES-R series Algorithm Working Group (AWG) program. The LAP products have been validated with a tool developed at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in near real-time (NRT) (http://soundingval.ssec.wisc.edu/) with several reference datasets including radiosonde observation (RAOB) at conventional RAOB sites, and Global Positioning System (GPS from SuomiNet) and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) TPW measurements, as well as global operational analysis from NOAA and ECMEF models. While the products are still in a beta state, validation results from 2017 indicate that GOES-16 LAP products meet the specifications and are ready for operational applications. Examples from 2017 Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) summer experiments are shown for potential operational application of LAP products in weather monitoring and forecasting.