Real-Time data for Societal Benefits (Invited)

Satellite Direct Broadcast (DB) has existed since the early 60's, and since then ground Direct Readout (DR) has been the cornerstone of real-time environmental monitoring. Beginning in the mid 80's NASA's primary interest in DR has been in the demonstration of practical applications of DR ground system technologies, including real-time data distribution, data mining, distributed processing and data archiving, and dynamic data management. These technologies combined with access to DR science processing algorithms (SPA)s have been playing an increasing role in temporal studies and tactical applications such as volcanic eruptions and plume tracking, sand storm dust distribution, snow and ice distributions, fire detection, weather now-casting and polar winds, to mention a few. In the evolution of direct readout three things need to be in place in order to provide societal benefits: availability of freely transmitted instrument direct broadcast (from space or Ethernet), access to direct readout science application algorithms and a decision-making infrastructure that makes use of DR results. These areas will be discussed in this presentation along with the necessary supporting technologies. Additionally, this presentation will highlight DR's increasing role in temporal remote sensing research and tactical remote sensing.