The Transition from Current Atmospheric Measurements to the NPOESS Era

Transitioning from the current polar environmental satellite environment to the NPOESS era presents challenges as well as opportunities for the atmospheric remote sensing community. The heritage instruments of the POES, DMSP, and EOS series have revolutionized weather prediction and made significant contributions to our ability to monitor climatic variations and change. The next generation of polar satellite instruments, as represented by NPOESS, will have unprecedented observing capabilities. Its hyperspectral sounding and imaging instruments with finer wavelength, spatial, and temporal resolution, but with orders of magnitude more data, will provide atmospheric measurements with information content, timeliness, and detail never before attained. We discuss the increases in information on atmospheric temperatures, water vapor, ozone, greenhouse gases, aerosols, and clouds that will result from the transition from current operational infra-red and microwave sounders, visible, infrared, and microwave imagers, and ozone instruments to their NPOESS counterparts. But a number of problems must be solved before these data can be optimally applied in weather and climate applications. Extracting the essential information from the flood of data in real time applications is acute. Increasing pressures to improve weather, climate, and environmental hazards analysis and prediction capabilities are leading to more stringent and expanding applications. Generation of long term stable, seamless climate data records from legacy POES, EOS, NPP, and NPOESS instruments will require detailed attention to satellite inter-calibration. Development of new environmental hazards applications such as air quality prediction will require innovative processing of the NPOESS era observations. Production of atmospheric carbon cycle products from IR hyperspectral sounders will require development of specialized processing algorithms. Preparation for new operational climate instruments on NPOESS - APS, ERBS, and TSIS - will further challenge the atmospheric remote sensing community. We discuss these challenges and suggest approaches for attacking them, including optimal schemes to extract the essential information from high volume data streams in real-time, integrate multi-sensor, multi-platform observations, and perform inter-calibration of satellite instruments.