Satellite development—CIMSS scientists and NOAA counterparts in the Advanced Satellite Products Team are supporting design of the proposed next-generation geostationary sounding instrument, called the Advanced Baseline Sounder. Simulating the ABS high spectral resolution capabilities, Tim Schmit showed that its retrieval of thin cloud measurements are significantly improved over those of GOES-8. Jun Li and Tim Schmit showed that the retrieval of both temperature and moisture profiles are significantly improved with the high-spectral resolution data and that both profiles meet National Weather Service specifications.

For the planned NPOESS program, C. Justice (University of Maryland-College Park) asked Elaine Prins (NOAA) to provide input on the projected performance of VIIRS, the Visible and Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, a payload being prepared for the next generation of U.S. polar-orbiting satellites. Prins produced summary graphics outlining the impact of the VIIRS high resolution 11 micron channel (375 m) on sub-pixel fire characterization. She found that if the VIIRS saturation brightness temperature remains at the proposed 340 K, sub-pixel characterization of fire size and temperature estimates will be limited to only the smallest fires; most fires will saturate the 11 micron band. A saturation brightness temperature of 675 K is being requested of the instrument designers.

Fire Detection—Elaine Prins (NOAA) is working with R. Valdez of the National Zoo’s Amazon division to integrate GOES Biomass Burning Monitoring information into an online Geographic Information System (GIS) venue to be featured at the Zoo. Valdez also may highlight fires in the Amazon for a future GIS Day at the zoo. This would include a focus on how environmental satellites are used to detect fires in the region.

Florida Fires—The CIMSS GOES Gallery featured a very large smoke plume from fires burning in northern Florida on May 24-25. With their GOES-8 Wildfire Automated Biomass Burning Algorithm products, Chris Schmidt and Elaine Prins identified numerous fire pixels associated with these fires that burned approximately 20000 acres by the morning of May 25. Scott Bachmeier produced imagery and animations using GOES-8. An shortwave infrared image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer reveals a very large hot spot. MODIS and GOES data are received directly into SSEC.

Useful Data—Gail Bayler (CIMSS) and Gary Wade (NOAA) retrieved four months of archived GOES sounder products for C. O’Dell of the Observational Cosmology Group at UW–Madison’s Department of Physics. The data, total precipitable water and cloud parameters, are used to correct astronomical measurements taken at the Pine Bluff Observatory near Madison. O’Dell wrote, “We highly used the data set we got from you last year (March-May 2000); it was interesting to see our detector response increase (at 30 GHz) as the pwv’s [precipitable water vapor] went up.”

To increase understanding of relationships between microphysical and dynamical processes, Jeff Key provided satellite retrievals of cloud particle phase, particle effective radius, and optical depth derived from NOAA’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer data to Dr. Ismail Gultepe of the Meteorological Service of Canada. Gultepe is comparing the satellite-derived microphysical cloud properties to those measured by aircraft during the Alliance Icing Research Study field project that took place over Ontario and Quebec regions of Canada during the winter of 1999–2000.

Field Experiment—To improve calibration of the Terra satellite instrument MODIS, Terra eXperiment 2001 took researchers and technical staff to San Antonio, TX in March. SSEC’s Scanning-High-resolution Interferometer Sounder and NASA’s MODIS Airborne Simulator (MAS) flew on the ER-2, a research aircraft that has played a major part in several SSEC-sponsored field experiments.

This image from NASA’s Terra satellite was received from the MODIS instrument at SSEC’s direct broadcast facility on March 31 during the Terra Experiment 2001.