Recent Advances to the Operational GOES Wind Processing System at NOAA/NESDIS

Recent advances to regional and global numerical modeling requirements at NOAA's Environmental Modeling Center (EMC)/National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) require higher quality satellite derived winds, particularly over the traditionally data void oceanic regions of the globe. NOAA/NESDIS has responded by implementing an upgraded operational wind production suite. This implementation provides high quality visible and IR cloud-drift winds as well as water vapor motion wind estimates at significantly increased spatial and temporal resolution. With increased computer resources, a ten-fold increase in the yield of "good" wind vectors for GOES-8 and GOES-10 are being generated every 3 hours for the Northern and Southern Hemisphere. Specific advances included in this implementation include automated image registration quality control, cloud masking, improved height assignments (cloud base), and new quality control strategies employed for the satellite derived winds. The new quality control strategies involve checks of the heights assigned to tracers and the development of a dual-pass objective quality control procedure. New processing strategies being evaluated involve the use of more frequent interval imagery for wind derivation and the generation of wind estimates on an hourly basis. All of these enhancements to the winds production suite have resulted in reducing the vector error. These wind estimates are having a notable impact on weather analysis and forecasting activities. EMC/NCEP now uses these NESDIS wind products in their global and regional data assimilation/numerical forecast systems. This paper and presentation will focus on highlighting the recent advances to the operational NESDIS wind product suite and the quality of these high spatial and temporal satellite wind vectors.