Proof-of-concept quantitative assessment of the socio-economic benefits and cost-effectiveness of Earth observing systems Weather, Climate, and Society

An approach is outlined to quantitatively assess the socio-economic benefits and cost-effectiveness of the Earth-observing systems. In a proof-of-concept demonstration, the benefits of different constellations of Earth-observing satellites are estimated using the methodology of ASPEN, the Advanced Systems Performance Evaluation tool for NOAA (Boukabara and Hoffman 2022). In ASPEN, the benefit is the degree to which an observing system or constellation of observing systems satisfies the applications requirements weighted by the applications priorities of those requirements. Here, a power law transfer function converts the nowcasting application benefits into estimates of lives saved during weather-related catastrophic events (CAT events). With very substantial error bars, the current operational observing system is estimated to save more than 1000 lives that would otherwise be lost in U.S. CAT events annually. The variation of CAT deaths due to differences in potential versions of the constellation of Earth-observing satellites is described and compared to the estimated costs of the observing systems.