GOES-R user data transfer mechanisms and structure

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are jointly developing the next-generation series of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), known as the GOES-R Series. GOES-R meteorological data is provided to the operational and science user community through four main distribution mechanisms. GOES-R generates a set of data from each of the six primary satellite instruments and formats the data into a direct broadcast stream known as GOES Rebroadcast (GRB) for hemispheric distribution via L-band satellite downlink. Terrestrially, meteorological data is provided to forecasters at the National Weather Service (NWS) through a direct interface to the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS). A secondary pathway for the user community to receive data terrestrially is via the GOES-R Access Subsystem (GAS), which is being developed as a part of NOAA's Environmental Satellite Processing and Distribution System (ESPDS) Product Distribution and Access (PDA) capability. Finally, GOES-R data is made available to NOAA's Comprehensive Large Array-Data Stewardship System (CLASS) for long-term archive. This paper will provide a summary description of the data types and formats associated with each of the four primary distribution pathways for user data from GOES-R. It will discuss the resources that are being developed by GOES-R to document the data structures and formats. It will also provide a brief introduction to the types of metadata associated with each of the primary data flows.