You're about to get an inside look at the NOAA-N mission and find out what exciting things this mission will do for us.
Our guests today include some of the major players responsible for the NOAA-N mission.
First, NASA POES project manager, Karen Halterman, tells us how the critical POES program and this mission affects our daily lives.
NOAA-N is a single satellite, but it's part of a constellation of satellites that
are in the polar-orbiting system, and NOAA uses two of these satellites
as their main operational satellites, and data from two of these satellites cover the entire globe of the whole earth at least four times a day.
And that's enough data to be used in the environmental models that predict the weather.
It's smaller than a school bus, but it's larger than a SUV. At launch, it weighs a little over 3000 pounds.
Our satellites last for many years and we have several of them up there at any time.
So that even if one of them fails before we launch the second one to replace it, there are older satellites that will still provide data.
So we have much more coverage now than we used to. Another thing is resolution.
We provide better resolutions than -- several resolutions and higher into the atmosphere than we did before.
The better the resolutions, the more accurate your data is.
And one of the advancements of the TIROS series started with NOAA-K which was launched in 1998 where we
started flying more capable microwave instruments.
And the microwave instruments are instruments that measure temperature and moisture content of the atmosphere.
And they're very, very useful because they can see through the clouds.
We also have some infrared instruments that provide good data, but they cannot see through the clouds.
And since a lot of the Earth is covered by clouds,
the microwave instruments have proven to be wonderful workhorse and a new addition to the meteorological family.
AVHR instrument measures two different temperatures. And the El Nino phenomenon is increased in the temperatures of the Pacific Ocean.
Well, since we've been flying this series since the late 70s, we have this nice climate database and have been able to see all the temperatures in the
Pacific through the years. So you do have this wonderful database that you can go back and look for trends.
The AVHR is used for fire detection, but it's on a larger scale. It certainly has mapped the terrible wildfires that have occurred
in the western U.S. You also can see burning in the Amazon regions from the AVHR. It's also useful for smoke.
It can detect smoke from volcanoes or smoke from fires. It's also useful for that as well.
The AVHR is also useful for vegetation detection. It can detect how healthy plant growth is.
And if you compare year to year, you can correlate certain drought conditions from the moisture contents.
We also have the search and rescue payload, which is really not a science instrument the way the instruments are that collect temperature and moisture
data. The search and rescue instruments are used to listen to emergency distress beacons that are set off by people on Earth.
Aviators and mariners, people with personal beacons that might be hiking in the Himalayas;
if you're in distress, you set off one of these beacons and then our satellites will pick up the beacon
and relay that information to an emergency coordination center and they dispatch their craft or boats to go out and help you.
Thank you, Karen.