NESDIS Looks Back at 2020

Despite the challenges presented by COVID-19, NESDIS made preparation for:

1. The GOES-T launch

2. The development and delivery of the JPSS-2 instruments

3. The development and delivery of the JPSS-2 instruments

4. Plans for NOAA’s first operational space weather satellite

5. Growth of the Blue Economy, and 

6. New partnerships to enhance research and ocean exploration.

NESDIS provided uninterrupted weather observations and monitoring for Federal, state, and local governments, and helped save 302 lives via operating the SARSAT System. NESDIS programs released 292 peer-reviewed publications and has archived approximately 4 PB of new data through the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). NESDIS increased the total size of the archives to 40 PB, granting public users access to 11 PB of data.  

NOAA was founded through executive action in 1970 and celebrated its 50th year during 2020 through highlighting special moments in the agency’s history. On April 1, NOAA and NASA celebrated the 1960 launch of the Television Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS-1), which aimed to view weather patterns from space for the first time in history. 

Sent into space 10 years before the creation of NOAA, the satellite only was operational for 78 days. It sent back nearly 20,000 usable images that proved the worth of weather satellites to the world and paved the way for today’s modern weather-observing systems.

NOAA satellites tracked 2020’s record-breaking weather events, such as the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record and wildfires across the country.

All together, there were 22  billion-dollar weather and climate disasters  in the U.S. This beat out the previous record of 16 in 2011 and 2017. The nation saw five disasters in August alone: ongoing drought in the Midwest and Southwest, Hurricane Isaias on the Eastern Seaboard and the Caribbean, the Midwestern derecho, Hurricane Laura in Louisiana, and multiple wildfires in California with smoke that circumnavigated the globe. The 22 disasters were a total cost of $95 billion—the fourth-highest price tag since 1980, the first year on record.

On Nov. 21, NOAA supported the successful launch of the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite in joint collaboration with NASA and  a host of international partners .

The advanced high-resolution data from the satellite will be critical in NOAA’s efforts to track sea-level rise as well as study tropical cyclone dynamics and predict hurricane intensity. The satellite will also help us better understand how Earth’s climate is changing, and how (and how fast) this climate change is reshaping Earth’s coastlines.

During the American Meteorological Society (AMS) meeting in August 2020, NCEI released the high-profile 30th edition of the peer-reviewed State of the Climate report. Detailing 2019, it had contributions from more than 470 scientists from nearly 60 countries, and involved tens of thousands of measurements from multiple independent datasets. It provided a detailed update on global climate indicators, notable weather events, and other data collected by environmental monitoring stations and instruments located on land, water, ice, and in space.

The State of the Climate in 2019 report confirmed that year to be among the three warmest years since records began in the mid-1800s. It also found that the major indicators of climate change continued to reflect trends consistent with a warming planet, while several markers such as sea level and greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere broke records set just one year earlier.

NOAA, in collaboration with NASA, announced on Sept. 15, 2020 that the solar minimum—the period when the number of sunspots and solar activity is at its lowest— happened in Dec. 2019 . Solar cycles last around 11 years, and solar cycle 24 began in December of 2008. Its maximum activity occurred in April 2014.

To better track solar and space weather, which can affect GPS and other navigational or telecommunication systems on Earth, NOAA is developing the Space Weather Follow-On (SWFO-L1) environmental satellite program, our first dedicated exclusively to space weather. It will have instruments that sample the solar wind, provide imagery of coronal mass ejections, and provide readings for other extreme activity from the Sun in finer detail than previous satellites could provide. This year, NASA has awarded a series of SWFO-L1 contracts to continue its development, set for completion in 2024.

The Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC-2)—known in Taiwan as Formosat-7—launched in June 2020, in joint collaboration with Taiwan, NASA, USAF, the National Science Foundation, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). Also, the mission’s predecessor, COSMIC-1/FORMOSAT-3 was officially decommissioned after 14 years of operation in 2020, while COSMIC-2 officially began providing data to NOAA that will soon incorporate terrestrial and space weather forecast models. The six COSMIC-2 satellites are expected to reach their final orbital positions by February 2021.

In 2020, NESDIS completed its first-ever purchase of commercially-provided satellite data for operational use and released a  request for information  on commercial capabilities for a potential Round 3 Commercial Weather Data Pilot (CWDP) for terrestrial weather applications, as well as future pilots for other applications.

NOAA maintained and established new agreements with international partners to secure access to Earth observations. NESDIS and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) signed a memorandum of understanding on a Global Observing Satellite Mission, which documented new cooperation on the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-3 (AMSR3) onboard the Global Observing Satellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle (GOSAT-GW). 

Also, NESDIS and the Vietnam National Space Center (VNSC) signed an implementing arrangement to strengthen the 2000 pledge for scientific and technological cooperation, which included but was not limited to cooperative activities on flood mapping and coastal water quality. 

By engaging with the commercial sector and strengthening its international partnerships, NESDIS is better able to explore innovative opportunities for data exploitation, instruments, spacecraft, business models and mission elements for future space-based observation architecture.

Through its Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, NESDIS also extended a 40-year partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to perform vital satellite meteorological studies as well as pursue and implement advances to exploit big data. Such work supports NOAA’s ongoing mission to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, coasts and oceans, and its efforts in sharing that knowledge and information with others.

Through its Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, NESDIS also extended a 40-year partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to perform vital satellite meteorological studies  as well as pursue and implement advances to exploit big data. Such work supports NOAA’s ongoing mission to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, coasts and oceans, and its efforts in sharing that knowledge and information with others.

NESDIS continues to make strides in its vision to employ cloud-enabled capabilities and artificial intelligence (AI) to increase security, efficiency, agility, and innovation. With the successful start of the Operational Secure Ingest Service (for internal customers to safely access external data) NESDIS completed the first operational use of the Common Cloud Framework. 

NESDIS also began to operationally ingest and disseminate data, part of a multi-year planning and development effort for NOAA’s Comprehensive Large Array-Data Stewardship System (the enterprise archive for NESDIS’s large programs) to transition to the Cloud, enabling access to information from a centralized data repository. 

In addition, NOAA made strides in executing strategic AI goals for improvements to NOAA’s products and services by endorsing an Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreement with Google. Under this three-year OTA agreement, NOAA and Google will jointly explore the benefits of AI and machine learning (ML) for enhancing NOAA’s use of satellite and environmental data for research, monitoring, and innovation through pilot programs. The agreement has the potential to enable a significant leap in NOAA’s ability to leverage the enormous volume and diversity of environmental data and prediction precision.

NESDIS's Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs (CRSRA) division has transformed the regulatory process to help US industry remain world leaders in space-based remote sensing. In 2020, CRSRA published new, streamlined regulations on licensing of private remote sensing space systems to the acclaim of U.S. industry, members of Congress, and other stakeholders. CRSRA successfully executed a new approach to commercial remote sensing regulation that improves our competitiveness by increasing regulatory transparency, reducing licensing process timelines by 50 percent, and lessening the administrative burden to licensees by at least 33 percent. This paradigm shift will ensure NOAA upholds its regulatory obligations while respecting industry’s interests.