ALBERT

Description: Severe weather events including tornadoes, damaging winds, hail, and their combination produce changes in land surface vegetation and urban settings that are frequently observed through remote sensing. Capabilities continue to improve through a growing constellation of governmental and commercial assets, increasing the spatial resolution of visible, near to shortwave infrared, and thermal infrared remote sensing. Here, we highlight cases where visual interpretation of imagery benefitted severe weather damage assessments made within the NOAA/NWS Damage Assessment Toolkit. Examples demonstrate utility of imagery in assessing tracks and changes in remote areas where staffing limitations or access prevent a ground-based assessment.

Description: Monitoring of rainfall and vegetation over the continent of Africa is important for assessing the status of crop health and agriculture, along with longterm changes in land use change. These issues can be addressed through examination of longterm precipitation (rainfall) data sets and remote sensing of land surface vegetation and land use types. Two products have been used previously to address these goals: the Climate Hazard Group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) rainfall data, and multiday composites of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from the USGS eMODIS product. Combined, these are very large data sets that require unique tools and architecture to facilitate a variety of data analysis methods or data exploration by the end user community. To address these needs, a webenabled system has been developed to allow endusers to interrogate CHIRPS rainfall and eMODIS NDVI data over the continent of Africa. The architecture allows endusers to use custom defined geometries, or the use of predefined political boundaries in their interrogation of the data. The massive amount of data interrogated by the system allows the endusers with only a web browser to extract vital information in order to investigate land use change and its causes. The system can be used to generate daily, monthly and yearly averages over a geographical area and range of dates of interest to the user. It also provides analysis of trends in precipitation or vegetation change for times of interest. The data provided back to the enduser is displayed in graphical form and can be exported for use in other, external tools. The development of this tool has significantly decreased the investment and requirements for endusers to use these two important datasets, while also allowing the flexibility to the enduser to limit the search to the area of interest.

Description: No abstract available

Description: The National Weather Service (NWS) is deploying its nextgeneration decision support system, called AWIPS II (Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System II). NASA's Shortterm Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center has developed several software 'plugins' to extend the capabilities of AWIPS II. SPoRT aims to continue its mission of improving shortterm forecasts by providing NASA and NOAA products on the decision support system used at NWS weather forecast offices (WFOs). These products are not included in the standard Satellite Broadcast Network feed provided to WFOs. SPoRT has had success in providing support to WFOs as they have transitioned to AWIPS II. Specific examples of transitioning SPoRT plugins to WFOs with newly deployed AWIPS II systems will be presented. Proving Ground activities (GOESR and JPSS) will dominate SPoRT's future AWIPS II activities, including tool development as well as enhancements to existing products. In early 2012 SPoRT initiated the Experimental Product Development Team, a group of AWIPS II developers from several institutions supporting NWS forecasters with innovative products. The results of the team's spring and fall 2013 meeting will be presented. Since AWIPS II developers now include employees at WFOs, as well as many other institutions related to weather forecasting, the NWS has dealt with a multitude of software governance issues related to the difficulties of multiple remotely collaborating software developers. This presentation will provide additional examples of ResearchtoOperations plugins, as well as an update on how governance issues are being handled in the AWIPS II developer community.

Description: During the last year several significant disasters have occurred such as Superstorm Sandy on the East coast of the United States, and Typhoon Bopha in the Phillipines, along with several others. In support of these disasters NASA's Shortterm Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center delivered various products derived from satellite imagery to help in the assessment of damage and recovery of the affected areas. To better support the decision makers responding to the disasters SPoRT quickly developed several solutions to provide the data using open Geographical Information Service (GIS) formats. Providing the data in open GIS standard formats allowed the end user to easily integrate the data into existing Decision Support Systems (DSS). Both Tile Mapping Service (TMS) and Web Mapping Service (WMS) were leveraged to quickly provide the data to the enduser. Development of the deliver methodology allowed quick response to rapidly developing disasters and enabled NASA SPoRT to bring science data to decision makers in a successful research to operations transition.

Description: Numerous onorbit satellites provide a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions supporting the use of their resulting imagery in assessments of disasters that are meteorological in nature. This presentation will provide an overview of recent use of Earth remote sensing by NASA's Shortterm Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center in response to disaster activities in 2012 and 2013, along with case studies supporting ongoing research and development. The SPoRT Center, with support from NASA's Applied Sciences Program, has explored a variety of new applications of Earthobserving sensors to support disaster response. In May 2013, the SPoRT Center developed unique power outage composites representing the first clear sky view of damage inflicted upon Moore and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma following the devastating EF5 tornado that occurred on May 20. Subsequent ASTER, MODIS, Landsat7 and Landsat8 imagery help to identify the damaged area. Higher resolution imagery of Moore, Oklahoma were provided by commercial satellites and the recently available International Space Station (ISS) SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System (ISERV) instrument. New techniques are being explored by the SPoRT team in order to better identify damage visible in high resolution imagery, and to monitor ongoing recovery for Moore, Oklahoma. Other applications are being developed to refine light source detections with the VIIRS daynight band and to map hail during the growing season through combination of available satellite and radar imagery. The aforementioned products and support are not useful unless they are distributed in a timely manner and within an appropriate decision support system. This presentation will provide an update on ongoing activities to support inclusion of these data sets within the NOAA National Weather Service Damage Assessment Toolkit, which allows meteorologists in the field to consult available satellite imagery while performing their damage assessment.

Description: NASA's Short-term Predic1on Research and Transi1on (SPoRT) Center supports the transi1on of unique NASA and NOAA research activities to the operational weather forecasing community. Our primary partners are NOAA's National Weather Service, their Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs), and National Centers. These organizations predict natural hazards and also assist in the disaster assessment process, benefiting from remotely sensed data. In 2013, SPoRT continued to transition high resolution satellite imagery, derived products, and value-added analysis to WFO partners and NASA's Applied Sciences Program.

Description: No abstract available

Description: No abstract available