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Appendix A Letter to NOAA/NESDIS
Pages 91-101

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From page 91...
... Appendixes
From page 93...
... Withee NESDIS Exec Route: E Building SSMC1 -- Room: 8338 1335 East West Highway Silvery Spring, MD 20910-3284 Dear Greg: It was a pleasure to work with you and your staff during the NRC-NOAA workshop on Opportunities for NOAA's Environmental Satellite Program. Your attendance at essentially the entire workshop was very much appreciated by the participants.
From page 94...
... Potential Study: An Unencumbered Vision for the Future All three splinter groups recommended the development of a largely unencum bered vision for the future architecture of NESDIS's satellite and ground systems. In side discussions, several participants quoted the familiar, "Form follows function." NOAA/NESDIS is the de facto and de jure national agent for the conduct of operational Earth observations from space and for the archiving of the resulting data; this places NOAA in an extraordinarily important position in the federal structure.
From page 95...
... A study could reexamine the present requirements on the system to assure their continued validity, project potential evolved NPOESS, GOES, and possibly other satellite configurations, and also seek revolutionary architectures going beyond the incremental evolution of the current plans. An examination of the space segment could address satellite size, but also on-board processing, "bent-pipe" data communication, the role of direct broadcast, space cross-links, spacing on orbit, and the scheduled or unscheduled use of excess capacity on launch vehicles such as the Atlas-5 and Delta-4.
From page 96...
... Trained, expert personnel moved from one set of spacecraft to the other and provided numerous efficiencies. Corporate reorganiza tions and the merger of the two programs have eliminated this advantage, and the NPOESS effort must stand on its own -- without sharing of development costs and without an easy means to smooth fluctuations in workload as occurred between the separate POES and DMSP activities.
From page 97...
... Naturally, beyond the ITAR issues, the engagement of international partners in the overall NESDIS effort may be complicated by the POES/DMSP merger, and by the DOD's understandable requirement to be assured of the availability of its data sources. The workshop participants did not offer responses to this concern, but one can imagine the DOD users welcoming the availability of a richer set of information than they would otherwise have.
From page 98...
... On the other hand, some participants also noted how future enhancements in weather forecasting would involve not only the atmosphere but also the integration of still further ocean and land data into the forecasting models, so the complexity of those models will con tinue to grow despite not encompassing all local needs. Extending the time over which effective weather forecasts can be made will require a better characterization of all of the boundaries of the models, and of the internal variables of the models as well.
From page 99...
... In the analysis of conventional data networks, an engineer describes the various linkages using drawings and computers, and examines the capacities and blockages that may occur. It is an appealing picture, and it is tempting to seek to apply this concept to data utilization in NOAA's data world.
From page 100...
... In some instances those users may be principally concerned with relative measurements, e.g., a time series showing how a particular phenomenon evolves where the desired information is in the changes rather than their absolute values. In other instances, as in the measurement of climate change, issues of data continuity, calibration, and long-term stability will dominate as researchers examine data over the extended lifetime of an individual sensor or from several sensors on multiple space platforms.
From page 101...
... Appendix A 101 cited would certainly be a worthy target, and would require extensive use and re-use of NOAA's environmental data. The workshop participants strongly believe that there is much more of value that can be mined from NOAA's archived and realtime data.


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