The Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation

Abstract

NASA, NOAA, and the Department of Defense use common infrastructure and directed research to address the research-to-operations problem for satellite data assimilation. The Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) was established by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2001, with the Department of Defense (DoD) agencies becoming partners in 2002. The goal of JCSDA is to accelerate the use of observations from Earth-orbiting satellites in operational environmental analysis and prediction models for the purpose of improving weather forecasts, improving seasonalto-interannual climate forecasts, and increasing the accuracy of climate datasets. Advanced instruments of the current and planned satellite missions do and will increasingly provide large volumes of data related to the atmospheric, oceanic, and land surface states. During this decade, the plan will result in a five order

The National Earth System Prediction Capability: Coordinating the Giant

“…Additionally, the NUOPC (Sandgathe et al 2011) established a multimodel global atmosphere and wave ensemble, using the computational power of the separate prediction centers for products that bring increased skill to all the partners, and common modeling architecture to accelerate the transition of new technologies into operations. The JCSDA (www.jcsda .noaa.gov/; Le Marshall et al 2007) focuses on data assimilation techniques for new satellite data types and phenomena such as ocean surface salinity and land surface states to reduce the time from satellite launch to operational data use in operational NWP.…”

The Emergence of Weather-Related Testbeds Linking Research and Forecasting Operations

“…USWRP provided seed funding to initiate JCSDA prior to the creation of new core funding. It is a distributed and collaborative effort that provides a focal point for the development of common software and infrastructure for the partner agencies (Le Marshall et al 2007). The partnership allows these agencies to enhance the usefulness of the billions of satellite observations currently available daily and to fully prepare for the flood of data from the advanced satellite instruments to be launched during this decade.…”

“…6). Examples of success include advances in formulating the Community Radiative Transfer Model (CRTM), assessing the impact of assimilation of Advanced Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) data, and provision of AIRS data to operational centers worldwide af ter the data have been "t hinned " appropriately (Le Marshall et al 2007). …”

Using Sensor Web Processes and Protocols to Assimilate Satellite Data into a Forecast Model

“…Because of the potential to reduce the loss of property and lives, appropriate data assimilation in evolving high-impact weather situations is likely a more effective use of computer time and associated manpower than forecast improvements in low-impact weather systems. The requirement to quickly process and assimilate these large data volumes from multisensor platforms often results in significant sub-sampling of high resolution data to accomplish the processing in a timely manner [1].…”