The GOES-R Proving Ground: An Opportunity For Forecasters To Shape The Satellite Products of The Future.

Abstract

The first launch of the next generation of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (called GOES-R) is scheduled for 2015. GOES-R will not only provide higher resolution imagery at more frequent intervals, but will also have 16 imager bands, compared to five in the current GOES. This will allow for many potential new products that can be provided to the forecast community. Ensuring that the most useful of these products actually gets into operations when the satellite is launched is a primary task of the GOES-R Proving Ground project. A key to the Proving Ground is bridging the gap between the developers and end users for the purposes of training, product evaluation, and solicitation of user feedback. The project represents a real possibility for forecasters to help determine the products that they will see in the GOES-R era. There are three main Proving Ground partners, the Cooperative Institute for Research of the Atmosphere (CIRA), the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) and NASA’s Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Program. These three organizations engage in developing new products that demonstrate the capabilities of the future GOES-R satellites, and testing prototypes with operational forecasters. In this talk we will give an overview of the GOES-R Proving Ground, with a focus on CIRA’s efforts, which began over three years ago with interaction with the two closest National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs), at Boulder, Colorado and Cheyenne, Wyoming. The effort has expanded to over 15 WFOs and a number of national centers in the U.S. We will address the products being tested, feedback received, and the challenges we have encountered in the area of forecaster feedback, as well as future plans, with an update from the latest GOES-R Proving Ground Annual Meeting scheduled for May 2012.