Advanced marine information delivery

The paper examines the information delivery challenges of the follow-on programs to Seasat-1 as they may progress through the next decade. These challenges include coping with the vast amounts of data to be transferred, fulfilling the temporal requirements on data delivery, and the tradeoffs and developments needed to accomplish the various levels of processing required to convert sensor output into useful information. A need for critical development is clearly identifiable in the areas of (1) low cost ground terminals capable of image extraction and image correlation; (2) dynamic data assimilation to accommodate forecasters; (3) low resolution onboard correlators; and (4) low cost user advisory (display) terminals. The system planners for the Ocean Satellite advanced programs are using an end-to-end data systems approach in meeting these challenges.