"In this presentation, two NASA-funded projects to improve atmospheric observations from small satellite platforms will be discussed. The Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission was selected by NASA as part of the Earth Venture-Instrument (EVI-3) program. The overarching goal for TROPICS is to provide nearly all-weather observations of 3-D temperature and humidity, as well as cloud ice and precipitation horizontal structure, at high temporal resolution to conduct high-value science investigations of tropical cyclones (TCs), including: (1) relationships of rapidly evolving precipitation and upper cloud structures to upper-level warm-core intensity and associated storm intensity changes; (2) evolution (including diurnal variability) of precipitation structure and storm intensification in relationship to environmental humidity fields; and (3) the impact of rapid-update observations on numerical and statistical intensity forecasts of tropical cyclones. The four TROPICS constellation satellites (5.4 kg each) were successfully launched into orbit on May 8 and May 25, 2023 into two orbital planes inclined at 33 degrees with 550-km altitude.  Each CubeSat comprises a Blue Canyon Technologies bus and a high-performance radiometer payload to provide temperature profiles using seven channels near the 118.75 GHz oxygen absorption line, water vapor profiles using three channels near the 183 GHz water vapor absorption line, imagery in a single channel near 90 GHz for precipitation measurements (when combined with higher resolution water vapor channels), and a single channel at 205 GHz that is more sensitive to precipitation-sized ice particles. TROPICS spatial resolution and measurement sensitivity is comparable with current state-of-the-art observing platforms. Data is downlinked to the ground via the KSAT-Lite ground network with latencies better than one hour. NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) Program Office approved the separate TROPICS Pathfinder mission, which launched on June 30, 2021, in advance of the TROPICS constellation mission as a technology demonstration and risk reduction effort. The TROPICS Pathfinder mission continues to yield excellent data over 24+ months of operation and has provided an opportunity to checkout and optimize all mission elements prior to the primary constellation mission. The Configurable Reflectarray for Electronic Wideband Scanning Radiometry (CREWSR) project awarded as part of the NASA ESTO Instrument Incubator Program (IIP) will provide a demonstration of all technologies needed for a large (~2x2 m), configurable aperture to be deployed from small satellite platforms.  The system can operate near 24, 31, and 50-58 GHz with electronically scanned antenna beams, thereby eliminating any need for mechanical scanning and momentum compensation.  The system is lightweight, very low power, and is built on low-cost silicon-on-insulator parts and proven techniques for deploying rigid precision surfaces.  This presentation will overview these two projects providing history, status, and outlook."

Dr. William J. Blackwell is a laboratory fellow in the Applied Space Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he leads a number of projects involving atmospheric remote sensing, including the development and calibration of airborne and space-borne microwave sensors, the retrieval of geophysical products from remote radiance measurements, and the application of electromagnetic, signal processing, and estimation theory.

Dr. Blackwell has served as associate editor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing and the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) Magazine, cochair of the IEEE GRSS Remote Sensing Instruments and Technologies for Small Satellites working group, the NASA Aqua science team, and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Radio Frequencies. He is currently the principal investigator on the NASA TROPICS Earth Venture mission. He was previously the Integrated Program Office sensor scientist for the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder on the Suomi National Polar Partnership launched by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2011 and the Atmospheric Algorithm Development team leader for the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Microwave Imager/Sounder.

Dr. Blackwell received the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Technical Excellence Award in 2019 for his "innovative contributions to the science and practice of environmental monitoring." He was selected as a 2012 recipient of the IEEE Region 1 Managerial Excellence in an Engineering Organization Award "for outstanding leadership of the multidisciplinary technical team developing innovative future microwave remote sensing systems." In 2009, he was presented with the  NOAA David Johnson Award for his work in neural network geophysical parameter retrievals and microwave calibration and is coauthor of "Neural Networks in Atmospheric Remote Sensing" (Artech House, 2009) and "Microwave Radar and Radiometric Remote Sensing" (Artech House, 2015). Blackwell has also been an author of more than 180 publications related to atmospheric remote sensing. He is a fellow of the IEEE and an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

In further discussion with Dr. Huemmrich, we learned that another tower is set up in the Optimizing Production Inputs for Economic and Environmental Enhancement (OPE3) field in the USDA Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. This field is also just down the road from Goddard. This year it is in soybeans. Drs. Huemmrich and Campbell are testing out a new version of the instrument called a "NoX" (for Near IR box). These instruments break down the light reflected from the plants into hundreds of narrow spectral bands that cover the visible light that we can see and on into the infrared beyond what we can see. Drs. Huemmrich and Campbell are using it to collect data to help develop and test new algorithms for detecting crop biochemistry and productivity that can be applied to upcoming NASA missions like PACE and SBG. 

"The transport of air and water by convective storms in the tropics assists in driving the large-scale circulation, determines convective anvil properties and their cloud radiative forcing, and is integrally linked to fresh water and extreme weather. This convective mass flux (CMF) forms the focus of the recently selected NASA Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) mission to be launched in 2026. INCUS is comprised of a train of three SmallSats, each of which will carry a Ka-band cloud radar, and one of which will also house a passive microwave radiometer. The three SmallSats are separated by time intervals of 30, 90 and 120 seconds which facilitate the rapid and systematic sampling of the same storm by all three spacecraft, and estimates of CMF will be obtained by applying a novel time differencing technique. INCUS will therefore provide the first global systematic investigation into CMF, and its variation as a function of storm type, storm lifecycle and environmental properties. 

A wide range of research tasks have been conducted during the development phases of the INCUS mission including: (1) conducting and analyzing extensive suites of large-domain, high-resolution model simulations; (2) examining ground-based radar observations obtained at time intervals similar to that of INCUS using adaptive scanning techniques during several recent field campaigns; and (3) evaluating convective anvil properties using passive microwave radiometer and geoIR data. This seminar will include a description of the INCUS mission architecture and measurement approach, as well as specific highlights arising from these modeling and observational analyses."

Dr. Susan van den Heever is a University Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. She joined the CSU faculty in 2008 after obtaining her B.S. in Mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from Colorado State University. Dr. van den Heever's research is focused on convective cloud processes, specifically microphysical and dynamical feedbacks, updraft dynamics, cold pool dynamics, and aerosol-cloud interactions, as well as the representation of these processes in numerical models. She is the PI of the NASA INCUS mission, a recently selected Earth Ventures mission designed to fly a train of radars and a radiometer in space, with the goal of understanding why, when and where convective storms form in the tropics, and why only some of these storms produce extreme weather. She also oversees the development of the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) model, a sophisticated cloud-resolving model. 

Dr. van den Heever teaches graduate classes in cloud physics, cloud dynamics, and mesoscale modeling, and is a co-author of the book Storm and Cloud Dynamics. She is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, and has received the AGU ASCENT award, the AMS Edward Lorenz Teaching Excellence Award, the MIT Houghton Lectureship award, the OU Gal-Chen Memorial Lecturer award, and several CSU teaching and mentoring awards. She is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford. Dr. van den Heever served as an editor of JAS, co-chairs the GEWEX Aerosol and Precipitation initiative, serves on several advisory boards, and recently co-chaired the Science Community Committee (SCC) of NASA's Aerosol-Convection-Cloud-Precipitation (A-CCP) or AOS Pre-formulation Study.

We asked Dr. Lyu for some background information on his work with NOAA's Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2), now known as NOAA-21 (N21), and NASA/NOAA's Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS). 

The JPSS-2 (J2) was launched successfully on Nov. 10, 2022. He supported all the pre-launched planning, pre-launched spacecraft observatory-level testing, data evaluation and sensor performance, and post-launch 90-days test planning, and he assembled ATMS-related Post-Launch Test (PLT) procedure and requirement documents. During the J2 post-launch 90-days test phase, because of one major data downlink Ka-band transmitter loss, he had to modify the test plan accordingly. He implemented all ATMS-related test data analyses and put together J2 post-launch test reports, which included the following: J2-ATMS-6105 Active Geolocation Verification PLT Report; J2-ATMS-6111 Lunar Intrusion Mitigation PLT Report; J2-ATMS-6113 Scan Sync Offset PLT Report; and J2-ATMS-6106 Cold Calibration Position Selection PLT Report. (For the last two reports, Dr. Lyu provided major analysis results and partial reporting.)

"Initiated in 1998 by NASA and partners in more than 15 nations, the Southern Hemisphere Additional Ozonesondes (SHADOZ) network has collected nearly 10,000 ozone profiles from electrochemical concentration cell ozonesondes flown with radiosondes throughout the tropics and subtropics. These balloon-borne instruments are the only way to sample both stratospheric and tropospheric ozone at high-resolution. I will give examples of how SHADOZ has transformed ozonesonde operations, practices and science over the past 25 years.

1) Through launches coordinated for satellite validation, SHADOZ has supported 20-plus spaceborne instruments, advancing algorithms and enabling detection of instrument drift.

2) Working with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and other sonde researchers, SHADOZ has facilitated instrument intercomparisons and pushed ozone profile data accuracy from 15-20% in 1998 to ~2% in total ozone in 2023.

Most important, SHADOZ ozone profiles are a staple in studies of stratospheric and tropospheric ozone. Sonde data have elucidated the structure of the zonal wave-one in tropospheric ozone and impacts of the QBO and ENSO on ozone interannual variability. Our recent trends in free tropospheric and lower stratospheric ozone (Thompson et al., 2021) constitute a standard reference for satellite and model-derived estimates. We find that tropical tropopause height increased in the past 25 years, producing an artifact trend in lower stratospheric ozone. Convection also plays a defining role in modulating ozone structure. Seasonally strong trends over SHADOZ stations point to a decline in convective activity, particularly over southeast Asia (Stauffer et al., 2023)."