GOES-16 AWIPS RPM March 2018 Release Newsletter

By: the NWS Office of Observations' Total Operational Weather Readiness - Satellites (TOWR-S) Team

The NCF has made the March 2018 version of the GOES-16 RPM available in the AWIPS repository, and installation instructions are here. Be sure to review the site prep instructions included therein, which includes important ldm and pqact setting pre-requisites.

RPM Highlights

The TOWR-S team has been working with the NWS/NESDIS Satellite Enhancement Team (SET) on a weekly basis to bring these new AWIPS satellite improvements to you.  NWS WFO SOOs, Frank Alsheimer (CAE), Mike Stavish (MFR) Brian Carcione (HUN),  Pete Wolf (JAX), Jeremy Martin (GLD), and Dave Zaff (BUF) participate regularly with the SET.  Their leadership guides the team to make changes to AWIPS configurations files that allow NWS forecasters to best utilize GOES-16 data.  Thanks to their insight, we offer to you the following AWIPS enhancements in the March 2018 version of the RPM:

1) The Sea Surface Temperature product (located under the Full Disk menu) will now display as both Degrees F and Degrees C. A new colormap has been set as the default.  The range is modified to improve the depiction of temperature gradients.

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2) A new default colormap for the Full Disk Rain Rate/QPE product has been added.  This colormap aligns more closely with typical radar color tables. In addition, the max display range has been increased from 1.6 inches/hr to 3 inches/hr.

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3) The fill value assignment for the Fire Power product has been updated due to recent changes in the file formatting.

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4) The DefaultCompositeSatellite.xml bundle for legacy Satellite Imagery has been updated. The legacy satellite IR, VIS, and Water Vapor sub-menus for GOES-15 were all set to a 30-min (Supernational) time cadence, regardless of geographic scale selection, in the February RPM release.  In this update, the file is modified so that while using the CONUS/Regional/State map scales in AWIPS, the GOES-15 imagery will display using the CONUS sector from the satellite, which has higher spatial resolution and also higher temporal resolution (new image every 15 minutes) than the Supernational imagery (new image every 30 minutes). 

For the sake of continuity, it is not recommended that sites skip these RPM updates.

That's all for this month! 

If you have issues installing the RPM, please contact the NCF.

If you have any questions or feedback about the RPM contents, please contact Eric Guillot at NWS HQ at eric.guillot@noaa.gov or 301-427-9250. 

See you in May!