Meeting of the Working Group on SpaceBased Lidar Winds: View from NASA Headquarters

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Meeting of the Working Group on Space-Based Lidar
Winds View from NASA Headquarters

• Ramesh Kakar
• Weather Focus Area Leader
• January 27, 2009

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Recent Developments

• Tropospheric winds are the number one unmet
  measurement for improving weather forecasts
• In the last 2-3 years the mission design studies
  at GSFC have shown viability of the 400 km and
  828 km orbit 3-D winds mission concepts with only
  very reasonable advances in Doppler lidar
  technology. Also the studies have shown coherent
  Doppler only needs 0.25 J pulse energy while the
  technology has (separately) demonstrated 1.2 J,
  fully conductive cooling, and compact packaging.
• The NRC Decadal Survey specifically calls out for
  space-borne demonstration of 3-D winds but puts
  this in the third tier of its recommendation
• NASA/ESD has spent considerable effort in
  developing the needed technology, specifications
  and the theoretical framework

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Recent Developments

• NASA has selected seven proposals for funding as
  a result of the ROSES07 Wind Lidar Science
  Announcement
• Two additional proposals were selected by the
  Airborne Instrument Technology Transfer ROSES07
  element
• The IIP selected two new Wind Lidar proposals in
  April 2008
• ACT and AIST ROSES08 elements also selected one
  and two proposals respectively that are related
  to the 3D Wind measurements
• NASA plans to support a hurricane genesis field
  experiment during the 2010 hurricane season and
  expects a hybrid wind lidar system to be the
  primary instrument for this experiment

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ROSES Wind Lidar Science Selections
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Moving Objects Database Technology for Weather
Event Analysis and Tracking
PI Markus Schneider / University of Florida
Objective Provide earth scientists with
previously unavailable database management,
analysis, query capabilities that will
integrate 1) raw satellite data,2) analysis,
forecasts model information, and 3) decision
processes to support both the research
understanding of dynamic weather events, the
decision processes related to them. Proposed
technology components will be applied to tropical
cyclone weather events and observations from
QuikSCAT and TRMM to ensure data continuity to
the wind and precipitation data from GPM, and the
XOVWM, 3D Wind and PATH decadal survey missions.
Resulting system will be reusable
mission-independent, weather event-type
independent and system-independent

Technology components integrated into currently
available database systems.
DRAFT
Key Milestones Application/User requirement
study 1st Quarter Data Migration 3rd
Quarter Component development Year
1 Integration Year 2 Performance evaluation Year 3

• Approach
• Design implement a Moving Objects Software
  Library (MOSL), which provides a representation
  of moving objects, enables the execution of
  operations on them, and can be integrated into
  databases.
• Design implement a spatial-temporal query
  language (STQL) which enables users to
• Comfortably pose ad-hoc queries on weather data
  like tropical cyclone data
• Obtain an immediate response
• Retrieve satellite data based on user queries

(Assuming April 2009 start)
Co-Is/Partners Ashit Talukder/JPL, Tim Liu/JPL,
Shen-Shyang Ho/JPL
Draft 21 January 2009
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End-to-End Design and Objective Evaluation of
Sensor Web Modeling and Data Assimilation System
Architectures Phase II
PI Mike Seablom / GSFC
Objective Deliver an end-to-end simulator that
will quantitatively assess the scientific value
of a fully functional, model-driven sensor web to
provide an objective analysis tool for Decadal
Survey mission planning. The tool would enable
systems engineers and Earth scientists to define
and model candidate mission designs and
operations concepts and accurately assess their
impacts. Tool capabilities will be derived from
detailed case studies for a hurricane prediction
scenario using simulated data from three of the
Decadal Survey missions - Global Wind Observing
Sounder (GWOS 3D Winds) - Extended Ocean
Vector Winds Mission (XOVWM), and -
Precipitation and All-weather Temperature
Humidity (PATH)

Screenshot of SWS Scenario Design tool
DRAFT
Key Milestones

• Approach
• Build on previous work on Sensor Web Simulator
  (SWS). Focus on meteorological applications where
  information derived from a numerical model is
  used to intelligently drive data collection for
  operational weather forecasting.
• Simulation is essentialthe development costs
  deployment risk of an operational sensor web
  system are very high. This lets us
• identify types and quantities of sensor assets
  and their interactions
• evaluate alternative observing system
  implementations
• quantify potential development costs
• reduce operational deployment risk.

(Assuming March 2009 start)
Co-Is/Partners Steve Talabac/GSFC, Robert Atlas
NOAA, Robert Burns/Northrop Grumman, George
Emmitt/Simpson Weather Associates
Draft 21 January 2009
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Summary

• Considerable activity related to the measurement
  of vector wind profiles is ongoing at NASA
• The NRC Decadal Survey specifically calls out for
  space-borne demonstration of 3-D winds but puts
  this in the third tier of its recommendation
• The NASA management is committed to implement the
  NRC advice strictly along the suggested sequence