Advancing New Satellite Products into Operations: CIRA's NWS Proving Ground Plans

The past year has been an exciting one for NWS operations with the successful launch of GOES-16 late in 2016. Forecasters are now seeing more satellite data then ever before, with both new satellite bands and an ever-increasing number of new satellite products. The GOES-R Proving Ground efforts gave many forecasters a preview of some of these new capabilities and this has likely helped smooth the introduction of all this new information. The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) has been an active participant in the GOES-R Proving Ground since 2008, along with Proving Ground partners NASA SPoRT and CIMSS. Although a wealth of new satellite-derived products have been and are being added into operations based on baseline product decisions made in the years prior to the launch of GOES-R, new products have since been developed that would potentially benefit operations. Demonstrating and evaluating these potential products with forecasters remains an objective of the Proving Ground as we look ahead past the initial influx of baseline products.

In the coming year this type of Proving Ground demonstration will become more feasible as presumably any issues with product flow into AWIPS2 are resolved, allowing WFOs to again be open to the possibility of adding new test products to be evaluated through the LDM. A big advantage over earlier Proving Ground product demonstrations is that now we can use real GOES-16 data to generate new products, as opposed to using other sources for potential new products such as synthetic imagery or less frequent products generated from Polar orbiting satellites. This should make demonstration products easier and more useful for forecasters, and one would expect greater acceptance for trying the potential products. In this presentation we will discuss some of the new products that CIRA has developed, including GeoColor, Snow cloud/discriminator products, and DEBRA blowing dust products. Plans on how to better evaluate these new products using resources such as VLab will also be highlighted. Demonstration plans for both NWS WFOs as well as at National Centers will be discussed.