Turning Data into Forecast Information
Individuals and organizations rely on data to make operational and transactional decisions on a daily basis. 2011 was a year of severe weather, with twelve separate disasters, each with an economic loss of $1 billion. According to the NWS, severe weather events strain the economy. However, routine weather events in the U.S., such as rain, snowstorms, droughts, heat waves, high winds, etc. can add up to an annual economic impact of as much as $485 billion, or about 3.4 percent of the gross domestic product.
The Joint Polar Satellite System
NASA, under the direction of NOAA, is developing the next generation satellite and ground system known as the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), which will replace the current system. JPSS will provide meteorologists, oceanographers and researchers environmental data in quantities and quality never seen before. This enormous volume of high quality data will significantly improve the nation's ability to assess and predict environmental conditions that have a direct effect on our daily lives.
As part of the JPSS Common Ground System (JPSS CGS), Raytheon developed a Data Quality Management (DQM) tool—one component of the JPSS CGS Interface Data Processing System (IDPS)—to provide near real-time data quality assessments of low latency, high quality large data products to NOAA and NWS from polar-orbiting environmental satellites.
DQM — Managing Limited Resources
DQM, designed as a stand-alone data quality assessment tool, is capable of reading, processing and analyzing data formats commonly used in the environmental and intelligence communities.
According to Nicolas Powell, principal systems engineer, "DQM quality assessments can help our customers efficiently manage large volume data sets with limited resources, by saving data storage space, diminishing the time operators spend analyzing data sets and eliminating the exchange of data that cannot be transmitted into valuable information."
Obtaining quality data from JPSS will improve the timeliness and reliability of NOAA's weather and climate predictions, as well as its ability to predict severe weather days in advance — a benefit to all Americans.
