Title: Expected Performance of the Compact Midwave Imaging System
Presenting Author: Michael A. Kelly
Organization: JHU/APL
Co-Author(s): Dong Wu, NASA/GSFC; John Boldt, JHU/APL; Frank Morgan, JHU/APL; John P. Wilson, JHU/APL; Arnold Goldberg, JHU/APL; Kyle Ryan, JHU/APL; Jacob Greenberg, JHU/APL; Andrew Heidinger, NOAA/NESDIS; Edward Reynolds, JHU/APL

Abstract:
The goal of the Compact Midwave Imaging System (CMIS) instrument development and demonstration project is to increase the instrument's technical readiness for spaceflight. CMIS provides the critical midwave component of a multi-spectral sensor suite that includes a high-resolution day-night band imager and a longwave infrared (LWIR) imager to provide global cloud characterization and 3D winds. CMIS, the midwave sensor operating in the SWIR/MWIR, is designed and optimized for high-spatial resolution stereo imaging of clouds at different midwave spectral bands to retrieve cloud motion vectors (CMVs) and cloud geometric heights (CGVs) both day and night. The low-cost, low-size, -weight, and -power (SWaP) CMIS design is based on the use of a focal plane array with on-chip filters that requires less cooling, leveraging recent advances in MWIR detector technology. The low resources required for CMIS potentially allow it to be accommodated on smaller spacecraft such as CubeSats and enable cloud observations from a multi-satellite constellation to meet NASA science objectives and AF/NOAA operational requirements for high spatial resolution and frequent revisits. JHU/APL has recently completed the preliminary design of CMIS and will begin fabrication and assembly in 2018. The filters have been specified and the detectors are on order. In addition, JHU/APL is also developing an end-to-end CMIS performance model based on projected detector characteristics, optical transmissions and resolutions, and input cloud scenes to assess the accuracy and precision of CGHs and CMVs retrieved by CMIS. The model runs will be repeated with measured detector characteristics as the filters and detectors are delivered, and then extended to different scenes (e.g. multiple cloud layers, thin cirrus) generated from a cloud resolving model. In this presentation, an overview of the CMIS instrument design, concept of operations, and system performance will be presented.