April 2023- November 2023
Mike Schmidt, Tom Yoksas, Mike Zuranski, Stonie Cooper
Unidata continues to operate satellite downlink facilities for the NOAAPort Satellite Broadcast Network (SBN) and GOES-East and GOES-West rebroadcast services on behalf of UCAR/NCAR and the Unidata community. All received products are then provided via the Internet Data Distribution system (IDD) in various feeds and via remote access provided by AWIPS EDEX, McIDAS ADDE and THREDDS Data Servers.
Details on various efforts related to maintaining this capability are presented below.
Does the committee have any recommendations for other products or services based on our existing satellite ingest that would be beneficial for the community?
These moves were made for three reasons related to the NWS movement of the
SBN from Galaxy 28 (located at 89W) to Galaxy 31 (located at 121W):
Getting the worst offending tree removed or, at least, pruned enough to mitigate the problems being caused by the branches is unlikely.
See Ongoing Activities for additional information.
An effort to establish a satellite downlink facility at the NCAR Marshall field site (just south of Boulder) has been slowed by an NSF moratorium on any ground penetrations until an environmental impact assessment (NEPA) has been completed. A non-penetrating ground mount will be installed in the Marshall compound, and a 3.8 m dish will be installed on the mount in the coming weeks. Following the satellite pad and dish installations, electronics needed to complete the downlink will be installed, and ingest testing will begin.
After the Marshall installation is complete, and assuming that high quality NOAAPort ingest can be achieved, and the interference of the trees at FL-2 can not be mitigated, the existing FL-2 NOAAPort solid dish will be converted to GRB downlink as it has an unobstructed view of the GOES-East orbital slot. This conversion would require that existing quad-shielded RG-11 coax be replaced by a dual run of LMR-400 coax from the dish to the 2nd floor computer room, and the LNB on the dish outside of the FL-2 cafeteria be moved to the dish being repurposed.
In the spring of 2022, we were given a 3.8 m satellite dish that was being excessed by a private company that was relocating their operations. This dish will be installed on the western satellite pad at the NCAR Mesa Lab. The running of dual coax cables from the western pad to the main Mesa Lab machine room has been completed, so the next step is the physical installation of this dish on the existing mounting pole
On March 21, 2021 Graeme Martin (UWisconsin/CIMSS) announced the initial release of Gridded Geostationary Lightning Mapper (Gridded GLM) software package:
The software is capable of processing GOES-16 and GOES-17 GLM Level 2+ products in mission standard format, generating a new set of products which have been gridded to the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) 2-km resolution, and are aggregated at one-minute intervals. Spatial extent information that is not readily available in the GLM L2+ data is recovered and used to create the gridded products.
The following products can be produced:
AWIPS-compatible tiles can optionally be generated, using functionality that was developed within the open source Python SatPy library.
Input GLM L2+ files can be obtained from the CSPP Geo GRB software running at a direct broadcast site, or from NOAA CLASS. Output is in NetCDF4 format.
We intend to implement this software, evaluate the products, and distribute them in the IDD when appropriate.
Gridded Geostationary Lightning Mapper (Gridded GLM) products from Amazon AWS S3
We obtained access (effort spearheaded by Tiffany Meyer) to Gridded GLM products being created by the NWS for use in forecast offices. Redistribution of these products in the IDD as replacements for the Gridded GLM products previously created by Eric Bruning of Texas Tech University was implemented in early summer 2022.
We have also obtained access to Himiwari imagery and Level 2 products from Amazon AWS S3. We are asking the User Committee to weigh in on the importance/need of adding some of these products to the IDD. One thing that must be kept in mind is the volume of Himiwari data is large, so the ability of end user sites to handle real-time feeds of the full set of data is in question.
As noted in previous status reports, the IDD FNEXRAD datastream was enhanced by the addition of MRMS products we receive in an LDM feed from NOAA/NCEP.
The IDD NIMAGE feed was repurposed a few years ago from a feed that only contains satellite image products distributed in NOAAPort to one that can include value-added satellite products. The question for the committee is if there are other products that should be added to the NIMAGE feed?
We welcome contributions of additional value-added Level 2 satellite products by community members.
To date, Texas Tech University (Eric Bruning), CSU/CIRA, and NOAA’s Vlab have provided value-added Level 2 products created from satellite image and lightning scans, and these have been distributed to the community in the NIMAGE IDD feed.
Continue working with SSEC on their fanout approach that insulates GRB ingestion from expected (e.g., twice per year solar interference periods; etc.) and unexpected (e.g., TI caused) service interruptions
We still want to establish a test bed for the creation of Level 2 (L2) products from GOES-16/18 imagery, model output and observational data.
The objective would be to provide the capability of running user site submitted algorithms to create L2 products and make them available for testing for a short period of time via the IDD, the TDS, McIDAS ADDE and AWIPS EDEX. This initiative has been slowed by the inability by most staff to work on-site.
We support the following goals described in Unidata Strategic Plan:
Prepared October 2023