Demonstrating S-NPP VIIRS Products with the Naval Research Laboratory R&D Websites

Abstract:

The Naval Research Laboratory, Marine Meteorology Division in Monterey, CA (NRL-MRY) has been developing and providing the global community with VIIRS-derived state of the art image products on three operational websites:

• · NexSat: www.nrlmry.navy.mil/NEXSAT.html
• · VIIRS Page: www.nrlmry.navy.mil/VIIRS.html
• · Tropical Cyclone Page: www.nrlmry.navy.mil/TC.html

These user-friendly websites are accessed by the global public with a daily average of 250,000 and 310,000 web hits for NexSat and Tropical Cyclone websites, respectively. Users consist of operational, research, scientific field campaigns, academia, and weather enthusiasts. The websites also contain ancillary products from 5 geostationary and 27 low earth orbiting sensors, ranging from visible through microwave channels. NRL-MRY also leverages the NRL global and regional numerical weather prediction (NWP) models for assessing cloud top measurements and synoptic overlays. With collaborations at CIMSS' Direct Readout site along with the AFWA IDPS-FNMOC and NOAA IDPS portals, a robust component to our websites are product latencies that typically satisfy operational time constraints necessary for planning purposes. Given these resources, NRL-MRY acquires ~2TBytes of data and produces 100,000 image products on a daily basis. In partnership with the COMET program, our product tutorials contain simple and graphically enhanced descriptions that accommodate users ranging from basic to advanced understanding of satellite meteorology.

This presentation will provide an overview of our website functionality: animations, co-registered formats, and Google Earth viewing. Through imagery, we will also demonstrate the superiority of VIIRS against its heritage sensor counterparts. A focal aspect will be the demonstration of the VIIRS Day Night Band (DNB) in detecting nighttime features such as wildfires, volcanic ash, Arctic sea ice, and tropical cyclones. We also plan to illustrate how NexSat and VIIRS websites demonstrate CAL/VAL ocean color activity. We will also discuss outreach and training efforts designed for research and operational applications. Our goal is to encourage the audience to add our URLs into their suite of web-based satellite resources.