Hal J. Bloom

Wedge-filter Imaging Sounder for Humidity (WISH): a practical NPOESS P3I and geostationary Earth orbit high-spatial resolution sensor

Tropospheric wind estimation is among the top priorities for the NPOESS Pre-Planned Product Improvement (P3I). This Environmental Data Record (EDR) can be achieved by tracking high spatial resolution altitude-resolved water vapor features at appropriate timescales using humidity imaging sounder observations. A Wedge-filter Imaging Sounder (WIS) can provide the required humidity imagery and has already been studied for application in geostationary orbit. The geostationary WIS would use spatially variable wedge filter spectrometers to collect earth radiances with ~1 km resolution over a broad infrared (710-2900 cm-1) spectral region at 1% spectral resolution. The proposed sensor is a compact, lightweight, and rugged imaging sounder with better sensitivity, spectral resolution, spatial resolution than the current multispectral GOES imager and with full disk coverage rates. A Wedge-filter Imaging Sounder for Humidity (WISH) incorporates the same Raytheon WIS technology and is being proposed for consideration for flight on the NPOESS 2130 and 1730 LTAN spacecrafts. WISH would take advantage of the payload capacity available for P3I demonstrations in NPOESS and would serve as a risk reduction and technology demonstration for future NOAA environmental satellite missions. In this paper, we present our analysis of WISH performance toward achieving the NPOESS P3I tropospheric wind objective. The practicality of WISH for the current NPOESS LTAN spacecraft configuration and its instrument concept, sensor design, detector performance, measurement calibration, and system specification is discussed in a companion paper.

Front Matter: Volume 8516

This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 8516, including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, and the Conference Committee listing.

Vector quantization with self-resynchronizing coding for lossless compression and rebroadcast of the NASA Geostationary Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer (GIFTS) data

As part of NASAs New Millennium Program, the Geostationary Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer (GIFTS) is an advanced ultraspectral sounder with a 128x128 array of interferograms for the retrieval of such geophysical parameters as atmospheric temperature, moisture, and wind. With massive data volume that would be generated by future advanced satellite sensors such as GIFTS, chances are that even the state-of-the-art channel coding (e.g. Turbo codes, LDPC) with low BER might not correct all the errors. Due to the error-sensitive ill-posed nature of the retrieval problem, lossless compression with error resilience is desired for ultraspectral sounder data downlink and rebroadcast. Previously, we proposed the fast precomputed vector quantization (FPVQ) with arithmetic coding (AC) which can produce high compression gain for ground operation. In this paper we adopt FPVQ with the reversible variable-length coding (RVLC) to provide better resilience against satellite transmission errors remaining after channel decoding. The FPVQ-RVLC method is compared with the previous FPVQ-AC method for lossless compression of the GIFTS data. The experiment shows that the FPVQ-RVLC method is a significantly better tool for rebroadcast of massive ultraspectral sounder data.

Design concept for a Wedge-filter Imaging Sounder for Humidity (WISH): a practical NPOESS P3I high-spatial-resolution sensor

Tropospheric wind is a top priority NPOESS EDR that can be retrieved by tracking high spatial resolution altitude-resolved water vapor sounding features in imagery provided by a humidity imaging sounder. A Wedge-filter Imaging Sounder (WIS) can provide the required humidity imagery and has already been studied for application in geostationary orbit by Puschell, Huang and Woolf. The Wedge-filter Imaging Sounder for Humidity (WISH) incorporates the same technology and is suitable for flight on the NPOESS C2 or C3 spacecraft. WISH would take advantage of payload capacity available for P3I demonstrations in NPOESS and would serve as a risk reduction and technology demonstration for future NOAA environmental satellite missions. In this paper, we present our analysis of a preliminary WISH sensor concept design, specification and expected radiometric sensitivity. The practicality of WISH for current NPOESS spacecraft configurations will also be discussed. The performance of WISH toward achieving NPOESS P3Is tropospheric wind objective will be discussed in a companion paper by Huang et al. in SPIE conference 5655.

The NPOESS System: Providing Improved Real-Time Data To Meet Future Needs

The tri-agency Integrated Program Office (IPO) manages the development of the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). NPOESS will replace the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) and Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) that have provided global data for weather forecasting and environmental monitoring for over 40 years. Beginning in late 2009, NPOESS spacecraft will be launched into three orbital planes to provide significantly improved operational capabilities and benefits to satisfy critical civil and national security requirements for space-based, remotely sensed environmental data. NPOESS will observe more phenomena simultaneously from space than its operational predecessors and deliver a data volume significantly greater than the POES and DMSP systems with substantially improved delivery of data to users. Higher (spatial, temporal, and spectral) resolution and more accurate imaging and sounding data will enable improvements in short- to medium-range weather forecasts. NPOESS will support the operational needs of meteorological, oceanographic, environmental, climatic, and space environmental remote-sensing programs and provide continuity of data for climate researchers. With the development of NPOESS, we are evolving operational “weather” satellites into integrated global environmental observing systems by expanding our capabilities to observe, assess, and predict the total Earth system - atmosphere, ocean, land, and the space environment.