Enhancement of Army Operational Capabilities With the Use of NPOESS Data

Abstract

PrefaceCoordination among U.S. infantry, armor, airborne, and special force elements has improved as new command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence technologies have matured and been fielded. Unfortunately, many of these technologies have also been made available to active and potential opponents of this nation. The end of the "Cold War" has seen the transfer of many advanced armaments and communication equipment to rogue states, terrorist groups, and endemic guerilla movements around the world. Those who are trained in the effective operation of modem military equipment represent a credible threat to relatively small rapid deployment forces sent abroad by the United States or its allies. Frequently, adversaries enjoy the advantage of time and terrain in the preparation of defenses, ambushes, and counterattacks in the vicinity of their redoubts.In such an environment, any resource that "leverages" the technological advantages of the U.S. Army and its sister services may spell the difference between rapid success or extended stalemate in tactical operations. One domain that has a driving role in Army operations is the weather that encompasses the battlefield. The commander in today's Army has substantial new environmental tools for enhanced situational awareness, which were unavailable until very recently. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has been instrumental in creating a number of these new tools. One example is the Integrated Meteorological System, a mobile system that integrates meteoro-logical satellite data, weather forecast models, data visualization utilities, and tactical decision aid (TDA) applications for timely use by the war fighter.New sources of weather and other environmental data will soon be available that markedly improve weather characterization over remote or data-denied areas. In this report, we examine the interaction of TDA model predictions with one such data source, the proposed National Polarorbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). NPOESS and similar weather satellite platforms follow polar orbits that are much closer to the earth than geo-synchronous satellites and thus have much higher spatial resolution. The current Department of Defense polarorbiting system, the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), has considerably lower spatial resolution than does the nominal NPOESS system, and the DMSP lacks the calibrated radiance imaging necessary to retrieve atmospheric optical depths that is available from NPOESS. We investigated the impacts that these NPOESS advantages have on target detection range estimates for low altitude sensors viewing tank or bunker-type targets.' Relative effects that data products from the current DMSP and future NPOESS platforms have on TDA results are topics of the study. Remotely sensed environmental properties can strongly influence the target detection range predicted by a TDA model in tactical scenarios. The TDA target detection range is therefore the metric that we have used to compare the quality ...