Monitoring the Health of
Remote Sensing Networks

The on-going project to monitor the health of many weather and climate observing networks will be addressing remote sensing networks. These include:

• Health of NOAA's NWS Next Generation Radar Network (NEXRAD)
  The 159 operational NEXRAD radar systems are used to warn people in the United States about dangerous weather and its location including flash flood warnings, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms.

Remote sensing networks to be addressed in the future:

• Geostationary Operational Evironmental Satellite (GOES)
  Circling the Earth in a geosynchronous orbit, GOES satellites provide constant monitoring of severe weather events such as tornadoes, flash floods, hail storms, and hurricanes. Satellite imagery is also used to estimate rainfall amounts and snowfall accumulations and the extent of snow cover as well as aid in the detection of ice fields and sea and lake ice movement.
  
  
• Polar-orbiting Operational Evironmental Satellite (POES)
  With its polar orbiting, data the POES satellites supports a wide range of environmental monitoring. POES data are used in forecasting, climate research and prediction, sea surface temperature measurements, volcanic eruption monitoring, forest fire detection, and global vegetation analysis.