More precise hurricane forecasts with NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP VIIRS satellite sensor

Space Daily via SPX: The ability to use satellites to locate a storm that could evolve into a severe storm or hurricane will likely become more accurate for this year's Atlantic hurricane season beginning June 1. By then, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's or NOAA's, weather forecasters will be able to further improve the use of sensors aboard the NASA-NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite known as Suomi NPP.

U.S. Polar Environmental satellites such as Suomi NPP provide complete global coverage twice daily, while NOAA/NASA Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites offer imagery over a fixed area. To improve the ability to better find and track hurricanes, NOAA scientists are finding ways to incorporate data from Suomi NPP's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, or VIIRS sensor, that allows observations of Earth's atmosphere and surface during nighttime hours and offers enhanced capability to see through clouds.

VIIRS provides many advances over previous operational imagers and advances compared to its research predecessor, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers currently operating on NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites. It is these advances in polar imagery that will give forecasters a new tool to improve their predictions.

..."This is a new source for gathering temperature and moisture structure within and around the storm, showing us what is steering the storm, and affecting changes in the storm intensity," said Mark DeMaria, technology and science branch chief of NOAA's National Hurricane Center in Miami.

...NOAA's National Weather Service uses large-scale global models to calculate a storm's projected path, size and intensity. The path and intensity of storms, and storms that could become hurricanes, are updated every six hours through the hurricane season. That information is relayed to the National Hurricane Center which zooms in to looks at the storm area in greater detail with its NOAA's Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting System....

The Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the United States’ newest Earth-observing satellite, NPP, acquired its first measurements on November 21, 2011. This image above shows a broad swath of eastern North America from the Great Lakes to Cuba.  VIIRS collects radiometric imagery in visible and infrared wavelengths of the Earth's land, atmosphere, and oceans. “This image is a next step forward in the success of VIIRS and the NPP mission,” said James Gleason, project scientist for the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.