Welcome to the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA)

What is the JCSDA?

The Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) is dedicated to developing and improving the ability to exploit satellite data more effectively in the United States. It is a distributed and collaborative effort that facilitates the usefulness of billions of satellite observations available daily and shared across several operational agencies in the United States.

JCSDA Vision:

A weather, climate and environmental analysis and prediction community empowered to effectively assimilate increasing amounts of advanced satellite observations from the evolving Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS).

JCSDA Mission:

To accelerate and improve the quantitative use of research and operational satellite data in weather, ocean, climate and environmental analysis and prediction systems. Satellite data volume has increased one-hundred-thousand fold in the past decade, from nearly fifty new instruments.

JCSDA Goals:

• Reduce from two years to one year the average time for operational implementation of new satellite technology
• Increase uses of current satellite data in numerical weather prediction (NWP) models
• Advance the common NWP models and data assimilation infrastructure
• Assess the impacts of data from advanced satellite sensors on weather and climate predictions

JCSDA News:

Impacts on Global Forecasts:
Conventional vs Satellite Data

Observing System Experiments (OSEs) are used to quantify the contributions to the forecast made by conventional in-situ and remotely sensed satellite data. Figure 1 shows the global mid-latitude (20° - 80° Northern and Southern Hemisphere) average 500 hPa geopotential height anomaly correlation (AC) scores for the control (black curve) and two experiments (NOCONV-green curve and NOSAT-red curve) through forecast day 7. The summer results are in Fig. 1a, the winter results in Fig. 1b. Scores lower than the control values indicate a reduction in forecast skill when the data are removed. Note the large degradation in the forecasts when the satellite data are deleted. The bottom portions of Figure 1 illustrate the application of statistical significance tests.

The results are a dramatic demonstration of the importance of satellite data in NWP. Eliminating all conventional observations results in a decrease of 6 hours in forecast skill at day 7, but eliminating all satellite data results in an almost 3 day decrease in skill. In other words, the addition of the satellite data makes the 7 day forecast about as skillful as the 4 day forecast without satellite data.

(Jim Jung, CIMSS/JCSDA)

See the full article in the March 2013 Quarterly Newsletter

Summary of 10th JCSDA Workshop on Satellite Data Assimilation

More than 130 scientists from the JCSDA and its academic and private sector partners, including principal investigators, program managers and JCSDA management/staff, participated in the 10th Annual JCSDA Workshop on Satellite Data Assimilation, at NOAA's new Center for Weather and Climate Prediction on the research campus of the University of Maryland in College Park, October 10 - 12, 2012. The plenary sessions were held in the building's magnificent new auditorium with its state-of-the-art audio-visual and connectivity infrastructure.

The purpose of these annual workshops is to review the ongoing and planned scientific development sponsored by the Center, and to plan and coordinate future efforts. The Joint Center supports scientific development work with proposal-based, internally directed funds as well as with external grants awarded via a competitive process open to the broader scientific community. In addition, JCSDA individual partners undertake their own research contributing to the Center's objectives.

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Report from the 2012 Summer Colloquium

The 2nd Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation Summer Colloquium was held in Santa Fe, NM from July 24 - August 3, 2012. The objective of these Colloquia is to foster the education of the next generation of data assimilation scientists. Eighteen graduate students and recent post-docs, as well as one more senior scientist, took part, selected by the JCSDA Executive Team from a pool of 27 applicants. A substantial fraction of the students have research interests beyond weather, including air quality and aerosols, climate, oceans, and ecosystem production.   More...

The 11th JCSDA Science Workshop on Satellite Data Assimilation, June 5-7, 2013

Introduction: The purpose of the annual JCSDA science workshop is to review the ongoing and planned scientific development sponsored by the NASA-NOAA-Navy-Air Force Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation, and to coordinate these efforts. To keep a sharp focus on the JCSDA science activities and to review technical progress of sponsored activities, participation in the science workshop is by-invitation-only. Two full and one-half days will be devoted to the meeting with plenty of time for discussions, interactions and scientific exchanges, both among scientists from all JCSDA partners and with JCSDA managers and decision-makers.

Heads Up: Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) Tutorial and Workshop, Aug 5-8, 2013

The JCSDA would like to bring your attention to the upcoming data assimilation events: the 2013 Joint DTC-EMC-JCSDA Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) Tutorial and GSI Workshop, scheduled for the week of Aug 5-8, 2013 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Center for Weather and Climate Prediction (NCWCP), College Park, Maryland.

This marks the third annual GSI Tutorial and the second GSI Workshop since the GSI became a community model in 2009. It will be the first time the JCSDA is co-hosting these two events with the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) on-site at NOAA, where the primary GSI developers are located.

GSI is the operational data assimilation (DA) system being used by various national operational and research centers, including NOAA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It is a three-dimensional variational DA system and has been extended run with advanced features, including the hybrid ensemble-variational data assimilation technique and the four dimensional DA framework.

External Research Opportunities

NASA ROSES

One section of the recently released NASA Research Announcement on Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) - 2013 solicits proposals in support of the JCSDA. Research and development proposals are sought, from external investigators, in the following priority areas in global models or data assimilation systems used by the JCSDA partner organizations:

1. Developments to facilitate assimilation of cloud- and/or rain-affected radiances from CrIS; and preparatory work for assimilation of GPM observations.
2. Assimilation of soil moisture observations from SMOS in preparation for the launch of SMAP.
3. Aerosol assimilation.
4. Data impact study for new MISR winds product.
5. Assimilation of satellite data in JCSDA partner ocean data assimilation systems.