After the publication of “Future NOAA Satellites: Planning for Microwave Remote Sensing Readiness” in the BAMS May 2021 issue (Iacovazzi et al. 2021), the authors were alerted by Steve Swadley of the Naval Research Lab that the following sentence in the article is not correct: “The Defense Meteorology Satellite Program (DMSP) also has satellites in the early morning orbit, but these satellites manifest a microwave imager and not a sounder.” The DMSP satellites have well-documented imaging and sounding capabilities, but this legacy U.S. DoD satellite program has been terminated and the remaining F16, F17, and F18 satellites are well beyond their 3- to 5-year design life. Currently, the U.S. Navy NWP systems still assimilate the temperature sounding channels from F16 Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) (channels 2–7) and F17 SSMIS (channels 5–7 and 19–24), and the 183-GHz channels that are still functioning (channels 9–11). The imaging channels on F16, F17, and F18 are all functional. The Weather System Follow-on Microwave (WSF-M) Program has been created in part to continue the critical DMSP passive microwave sensing capability. This program includes a polarimetric microwave imager, but currently does not include a microwave sounder. Studies are still ongoing to possibly add the sounding capability to the WSF as well as other CubeSat microwave sounding solutions.
Disclaimer. The scientific results and conclusions, as well as any views or opinions expressed herein, are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of NOAA or the Department of Commerce.
References
Iacovazzi, R., Q. Liu, and C. Cao , 2021: Future NOAA satellites: Planning for microwave remote sensing readiness. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 102, E1123–E1125, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-20-0291.1.
