A scanning strategy optimized for signal-to-noise ratio for the Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory (GeoCarb) instrument

The Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory (GeoCarb) will make measurements of greenhouse gases over the contiguous North and South American landmasses at daily temporal resolution. The extreme flexibility of observing from geostationary orbit induces an optimization problem, as operators must choose what to observe and when. The proposed scanning strategy for the GeoCarb mission tracks the sun's path from east to west and covers the entire area of interest in five coherent regions in the order of tropical South America east, tropical South America west, temperate South America, tropical North America, and temperate North America. We express this problem in terms of a geometric set cover problem, and use an incremental optimization (IO) algorithm to create a scanning strategy that minimizes expected error as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The IO algorithm used in this studied is a modified greedy algorithm that selects, incrementally at 5 min intervals, the scanning areas with the highest predicted SNR with respect to air mass factor (AF) and solar zenith angle (SZA) while also considering operational constraints to minimize overlapping scans and observations over water. As a proof of concept, two experiments are performed applying the IO algorithm offline to create an SNR-optimized strategy and compare it to the proposed strategy. The first experiment considers all landmasses with equal importance and the second experiment illustrates a temporary campaign mode that gives major urban areas greater importance weighting. Using a simple instrument model, we found that there is a significant performance increase with respect to overall predicted error when comparing the algorithm-selected scanning strategies to the proposed scanning strategy.