THE NAVY'S GLOBAL WEATHER SATELLITE IMAGERY
COLLECTION AND DISSEMINATION SYSTEM
The Navy has relied on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) -Tap program to provide satellite imagery for its US shore activities for use in analysis and forecasting. At overseas activities, we have relied on low resolution Weather Facsimile and polar orbiter Automatic Picture Transmission along with high-resolution geostationary imagery captured via the Navy Satellite Display System-Geostationary (NSDS-G). Due to the demise of the GOES-Tap program and a need to replace the aging NSDS-G, the Navy has developed a worldwide collection and dissemination system that both replaces and enhances the older technology. High-resolution geostationary and polar imagery is ingested and processed by Earth stations located at Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Centers worldwide. The imagery is made available for analysis, enhancement, and fusion of grid fields to the local forecaster analysts. Sectorized images also are provided automatically to the Center home page and to an image server where an automated web access is invoked by theater Meteorology and Oceanography (METOC) activities for use in their METOC Integrated Data Display System. This system optimizes web technology to provide worldwide satellite coverage to our decision-makers in near-real time and has provided a significant advancement over the GOES-Tap architecture.