Management

Ensuring the Climate Record from the NPP and NPOESS Meteorological Satellites

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(NPOESS) will serve civilian and defense needs for timely environmental data. These data
notably support weather forecasting and "nowcasting," but, if appropriately calibrated and
archived, they could support the examination of global change as well. The Department of
Defense and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are the principal agencies
responsible for NPOESS, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration provides the
technology for new generations of sensors and is the developer and operator of research
satellites addressing global environmental change. The processing and archiving of data from
NPOESS and its precursor mission, the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP), and the merger of
these data with research satellite data for long-term preservation and access are the focus of this
report.
Assessing and—ultimately—forecasting global environmental change is a difficult scientific
problem with important consequences for public policy. The resolution of both the scientific and
public policy questions requires long-term data sets that are carefully defined and well calibrated.
The only efficient and cost-effective means to obtain a major part of the satellite data segment of
the long-term record will be to employ the data available from NPP and NPOESS. Ensuring the
suitability of these data for analyses of global change will, however, require early consideration by
both instrument developers and data archivists.
The key recommendations of this brief study concern the creation of a long-term archive that will
enable preservation of the climate record from NPP and NPOESS. Long-term archives must not,
however, be dusty repositories of data; they should instead be active centers for data study and
utilization, with intensive involvement by the research community. The stored data need to be
robust and capable of improvement as scientific understanding progresses and computer
technology evolves. The data must also be readily accessible to the research community and
affordable for them. The challenges associated with the creation of such an active data archive
can be met only through collaboration between the operational and research communities. The
nature of the required collaboration is discussed in the report that follows.
John H. McElroy, Chair
Space Studies Board

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English

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ISBN: 0-309-12228-7

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