Harry Cikanek, Michael Kalb, Charles Wooldridge, and Mary Ann Kutny
NOAA NESDIS, College Park, Maryland
The cost of building and sustaining a truly global satellite observing system that addresses important operational environmental assessment and prediction priorities from local / regional to global scales, requires effective international partnerships. Such partnerships provide mutual advantages by leveraging complementary spatial and temporal coverage for vital observations of key environmental variables used in bench forecasting, numerical prediction models, impacting all manners of societal decisions related to environmental hazards, public health, safety, and economic interests. Over the last six decades, development of working international partnerships among the operational weather satellite community has been facilitated by the World Meteorological Organization and the Coordination Group on Meteorological Satellites, and a number of more broadly scoped multi-lateral organizations (e.g., land, space and ocean interests through CEOS and GEO). In addition, NESDIS benefits tremendously from highly focused bi-lateral relationships that involve sharing of operational satellite data, mutual development and exchange of scientific applications, joint missions and instrument deployments, ground station ingest capabilities, and mutual support and backup of functionally compromised assets. Specific work agreements in these domains are usually documented as sub-elements within a formal broader high level agreements, typically negotiated on a no exchange of funds basis.
Given the commitment of many nations around the world to invest in earth observing satellites for weather and environmental monitoring, there is an increasingly capable global observing system that has the potential for enabling major advances in the missions of hydro-meteorological agencies. Harnessing that potential will require increasing sophistication in international partnership arrangements. The presentation will provide a vision for what future cooperation should look like and how to achieve it.
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