NOAA’s Satellite Operations Facility in Suitland, Md. Photo: NOAA

[Via Satellite 02-25-2015] Harris Corporation, prime contractor and systems integrator for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) ground segment for the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite–R (GOES–R) series program, has completed the computer hardware delivery, installation and integration for the necessary operational systems.

The improved system totals three petabytes and delivers approximately 40 trillion floating-point operations per second of processing power. The GOES-R ground segment system is capable of ingesting, processing and distributing 40 times more data than current systems for the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) and more than 10,000 other direct users.

Harris has demonstrated the ability of the system to create new weather products in five minutes time, supplying forecasters with faster information. The current GOES operational system requires 30 minutes. The first GOES-R satellite is currently slated to launch in March 2016. Lockheed Martin is building the satellite.