The NOAA/NESDIS Near-real-time processing system was conceived as a proof of concept program, and implemented under the Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) Central Satellite Data Processing (CSDP) contract. It was initially designed to provide both NOAA and other operational customers with rapid access to a small number of products covering the continental United States. But it has grown over the last three years to be both a risk reduction experiment for future high-data-rate satellites, and a full fledged processing system which provides ten product suites with global coverage from two satellites to a variety of customers.

This paper will discuss upgrades in processor power, storage capacity, and network bandwidth that has enabled these improvements. It will also discuss various proposed improvements that attempt to further decrease data latency between observation and initiation of processing, and thus help improve product timelines.