HR: 08:00h
AN: SM51C-01 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System: Capabilities for Operational Space Environment In Situ and Remote Sensing and Solar Irradiance
AU: * Mango, S A
EM: Stephen.Mango@noaa.gov
AF: NPOESS Integrated Program Office, 8455 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, MD 20910-3320 United States
AU: Denig, W F
EM: William.Denig@hanscom.af.mil
AF: NPOESS Integrated Program Office, 8455 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, MD 20910-3320 United States
AU: Hoffman, C W
EM: carl.hoffman@noaa.gov
AF: NPOESS Integrated Program Office, 8455 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, MD 20910-3320 United States
AU: Furlong, D
EM: David.Furlong@noaa.gov
AF: NPOESS Integrated Program Office, 8455 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, MD 20910-3320 United States
AU: Haas, J M
EM: Mike.Haas@noaa.gov
AF: NPOESS Integrated Program Office, 8455 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, MD 20910-3320 United States
AB: Over the last decade, the tri-agency Integrated Program Office (IPO), comprised of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Department of Defense (DoD), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), has been managing the development of the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). Once operational later this decade, NPOESS will replace NOAA's Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) and DoD's Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) systems. The IPO, through its Acquisition and Operations contractor, Northrop Grumman, will launch NPOESS spacecraft into three orbital planes to provide a single, national system capable of satisfying both civil and national security requirements for space-based, remotely sensed environmental data. With the development of NPOESS, we are evolving the existing "weather" satellites into integrated environmental observing systems by expanding our capabilities to observe, assess, and predict the total Earth system - ocean, atmosphere, land, and the space environment. NPOESS will transform today's short-term, space-based space environment research missions and the previous operational missions into a sustained, operational space environment remote sensing observation program. A major portion of NPOESS is dedicated to the space environment missions of our users. Fourteen of the fifty-five NPOESS mission environmental data record [EDR] products address various aspects of the solar-geophysical parameters needed to characterize the space environment and solar irradiance. Three factors of our users' requirements present significant challenges for properly sampling the space environment spatial-temporal-spectral characteristics: 1.) the vast volume of the space environment to be covered on both regional and global scales 2.) the large range of natural time scales for the space environment phenomenology to be covered, especially the challenging-to-observe short time scales and 3.)the rapid updates and short revisit times required for both the assimilation into the progressing models as well as the direct use of the more regional space environmental measurements needed in near-real-time for varied "situational awareness and forecasting". The NPOESS space environment/solar irradiance instrument suite will provide most of these users' needs. In the early portion of the NPOESS mission these space environment measurement needs will be complemented by the still operating operational systems - DMSP, POES and METOP space environment sensor measurements and later in the NPOESS mission the METOP space environment sensor measurements. The projected performance for the NPOESS space environment and solar irradiance measurements against the users' requirements will be discussed in this paper. NPOESS will provide continuity of critical data for monitoring, understanding, and predicting space environment changes and assessing the impacts of these changes on short and long term time scales. The NPOESS team is well along the path to creating a high performance, polar-orbiting satellite system that will be more responsive to user requirements, deliver more capability at less cost, and provide sustained, space-based measurements as a cornerstone of an Integrated Global Observing System.
UR: http://www.ipo.noaa.gov
DE: 2494 Instruments and techniques
SC: SPA-Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005