NESDIS Program Overview and Strategic Direction (Invited Presentation)

The mission of the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) is to provide secure and timely access to global environmental data and information from satellites and other sources to both promote and protect the Nation’s environment, security, economy and quality of life.

In this talk, Dr. Stephen Volz, NESDIS Assistant Administrator, will discuss near-term NESDIS activities within the context of broader NESDIS strategic planning as identified in the 2016 NESDIS Strategic Plan. 2017 saw numerous NESDIS activities that made an impact on the Earth observation and forecasting communities: GOES-16 officially became GOES-East and operational and JPSS-1 was successfully launched. NESDIS, along with many partners, now generate a number of quantitative products from GOES-16 and S-NPP (and soon JPSS-1) to better monitor the Earth-atmosphere system.

Another important NESDIS activity was sponsoring the NOAA Satellite Conference which was hosted by NOAA CREST on the campus of the City College of New York. The conference with a theme “A New Era for NOAA Environmental Satellites” brought together users and providers of satellite data from the public, private, and international and academic sectors.

NESDIS activities in 2018 and beyond will build on these developments to further benefit the meteorological community, including the launches of GOES-S, and COSMIC-2A and the operational exploitation of JPSS-1. These satellites deliver significantly advanced capabilities that will continue to be the backbone of space-based environmental information provided by NOAA. Meanwhile, NESDIS is looking toward the 2030s and beyond, conducting bottoms-up space segment architecture studies, implementing an enterprise ground system for operations and rapid data product generation, participating in the National Research Council’s second Earth Science and Applications from Space Decadal Survey, and considering how to make best use of all available sources of Earth observation data, domestic and international, research and commercial, to contribute to the NOAA mission.