Research Use of Data from the New Generation of Geostationary Satellites

Abstract:

The new generation of geostationary satellites launched by the world’s satellite operators, especially the operational meteorological satellite providers, offer significant opportunity to study Earth system evolution in unprecedented detail, with significant enhancements in spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution over their predecessors. There Is already significant community interest in these satellites, including Japan’s Himawari-8/9, the US GOES-16/17, Korea’s Geo-KOMPSAT-2A, and China;s FY-4A, and data availability will only increase with future launches from these and additional agencies. The potential use of data from these satellites to address a variety of questions in the many disciplines that constitute Earth System Science is significant, especially in terms of applications of algorithms that were developed for high spectral resolution instruments aboard polar-orbiting satellites that now have significant heritage. To facilitate the research use of these data, NASA initiated several efforts including jump-starting several near-term efforts, and then openly soliciting for community input to a dedicated solicitation, Earth Science Research from Operational Geostationary Satellite Systems, released on 2019 for which selections were made in May, 2020. This solicitation was released jointly with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and combined led to selection of 27 tasks that will spend ~$15M over three years on research use of the new geostationary data. This talk will summarize NASA’s efforts to date and its planned coordination of these efforts with related ones through entities such as the Coordination Group on Meteorological Satellites (CGMS).