 Appendix VI: Science Team Risk Assessment
SOCD efforts will focus on achieving the objectives of this roadmap and, as best
possible, support the projected timelines. Risk is inherent in research and
development activities; consequently, there are elements of uncertainty in both the
science and the timelines. The anticipated risks for each science team are identified below.
Ocean Color
- Reduced operating funding levels jeopardize the existence of
globally-unique high-quality vicarious calibrations, potentially
leading to the loss of the only source of hyperspectral ocean color
vicarious calibration in the world and subsequent disruption of
calibration/validation efforts for NPP/NPOESS and GOES-R.
- Failing to provide vicarious calibration data to ocean color
sensors will cause climatological data inconsistency between
ocean color missions.
- Biased or missing in-situ measurements or comparisons
represent the highest risk and may lead to inadequate product validation.
- Failure to maintain updates to ocean color products and applications
may result in the increased benefits of new ocean color sensors not
being realized and the wasting of associated infrastructure investments.
- Failure to implement water mass tracking will lose an opportunity to
leverage Department of Defense investments and the result in NOAA's
objectives for coastal zone management being hindered.
Ocean Surface Winds
- Additional skilled, experienced personnel and stable funding are
required to establish a core critical mass of expertise and capability
to properly support the remotely-sensed ocean surface wind vector products.
Current resources are inadequate to support current requirements and to
properly prepare and plan for future operational needs.
- Scatterometry Data that is presently available will not achieve
its full potential within the operational weather community without
full understanding of the impact of high wind speeds and rain on
these measurements. If the impacts of these data at OPC and TPC
are not quantified while this data is available in near-real time,
NOAA will be inadequately prepared to meets its requirements and
defend the continuity of this capability in the future.
- Radiometry: If WindSat is not thoroughly investigated and validated
now, NOAA will be inadequately prepared for the operational NPOESS/CMIS
instrument and unable to address shortfalls that passive polarimetry
technique may have in meeting NOAA's operational ocean vector
wind requirements.
- Air-Sea Interactions: Without additional resources, operational
products derived from global ocean vector wind fields will not be
realized in a timely manner, thus reducing utilization of this data
in support of NOAA's objectives and the return on NOAA infrastructure
investments.
Sea Ice
- Sea Ice Product and Research Development: The major risk to sea
ice research and its transition to operations is the potential
failure of RADARSAT-1, which has already exceeded its design life,
and the subsequent loss of access to its synthetic aperture radar
data. NOAA currently relies entirely on foreign missions for synthetic
aperture radar data. Access to crucial data from the planned follow-on
mission, RADARSAT-2, if only available at a commercial rate, will
notably increase costs.
- The largest source of error in converting sea ice freeboard to
thickness is snow cover uncertainty. The application of snow thickness
estimates from passive microwave satellite sensors, such as AMSR-E and
from combining radar and laser, i.e., ICESat altimetry, is a key
activity. The precision with which these snow thickness estimates
can be made is uncertain.
- National Ice Center Polar Research: A significant risk to present
operations and a compounding issue to the potentially imminent loss
of Radasat-1 data are difficulties experienced by current SSM/I-based
algorithms during the summer melt period and adverse data quality
issues during inclement weather.
Sea Surface Height
- Altimeter Data Sets: There is no risk associated with the ongoing
GFO project. Jason-2 is also a low-risk project, given that all of the
software and procedures will be inherited from the ongoing Jason-1 project
being run operationally by NASA and CNES and we expect to adopt most of
the quality assessment routines presently being used by NASA/PODAAC and CLS.
- Ocean Dynamics: Based on the recent successful transition of the Pacific
OSCAR project to NOAA/NESDIS, the risk in the follow-on OSCAR projects is
associated with the extension of the OSCAR technique/methodology to
mid-latitudes as the time scale of phenomology approaches or becomes less
than the time scale of the observation.
- Marine Gravity and Bathymetry: There are no significant risks in the
gravity and bathymetry effort.
- Climate: There are no significant risks in the GSLR project. Much
of the software and procedures needed to implement an operational
altimeter calibration system have already been developed at the
University of South Florida. Funding has been identified to pay for the
full implementation of this system.
Sea Surface Roughness
- Technical risk areas include the development of new products for which
SOCD currently has no experience.
- Cost risk areas include the ability to pay for international SAR data,
which, heretofore, has been only freely available for research purposes.
Imagery for operational use is available only for a fee.
- Funding has not been secured for a U.S. domestic synthetic aperture
mission within NASA or NOAA. Planning is in progress for InSAR mission or
other possible missions to provide SAR data in the period around 2011-2015.
Sea Surface Temperature
- Risks associated with the proposed research significantly increase with
algorithm/ product complexity, as well as in data volume transfer,
processing, and storage.
- Failure to implement proposed research will have negative impact on
operational users, possibly compromising their respective missions.
- Risks associated with NPP/NPOESS can be mitigated through cal/val
efforts conducted by an independent governmental agency, within the
NOAA Data Exploitation (NDE) Program.
CoastWatch/OceanWatch
- Failure to maintain the interest and involvement of key Line Offices
in operational ocean satellite remote sensing may result in lost value
from NOAA infrastructure investments.
- Failure to identify adequate budget to allow development of maintenance
of existing and planned systems may result in lost opportunity for new and
quality operational products; subsequently support for NOAA and external
user requirements.
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