Atmospheric Science Events in 2012

During the next year 2012, there will take place several interesting conferences related to the Atmospheric Sciences:

- International Radiation Symposium, 6-10 August, Berlin, Germany

- Quadrennial Ozone Symposium, 27-31 August, Toronto, Canada

- European Aerosol Conference, 2-7 September, Granada, Spain

- Atmospheric Science Conference, 18-22 June, Bruges, Belgium

- EUMETSAT Meteorological Satellite Conference, 3-7 September, Sopot, Poland

- EGU General Assembly, 22-27 April, Vienna, Austria

- SPIE Remote Sensing, 24-27 September, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

- IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 22-27 July, Munich, Germany

- International Conference on Clouds and Precipitation, July 30 - August 03, Leipzyg, Germany

- European Meeting on Atmospheric Studies by Optical Methods, 20-24 August, Sopot, Poland

- International Conference on Meteorology, Climatology and Atmospheric Physics, May 30 - 1 June, Athens, Grecee

Ozone_cci project

The Ozone_cci project is part of the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Programme. Ozone_cci will develop, produce and validate long-term series of high quality global observations of atmospheric ozone derived from multiple satellite instruments that are essential to assess the fate of atmospheric ozone.
The task of the ESA Ozone-cci project is to improve on the scientific and operational exploitation of current European and Third Party Mission ozone monitoring sensors, by creating merged multi-sensors Essential Climate Variable (ECV) ozone time series that match the requirements formulated by GCOS, and allow reducing current uncertainties on the determination of ozone trends.
The Ozone_cci project team consists of 13 European partner institutions which are experts in the area of satellite retrieval algorithms, geophysical validation, system engineering and chemistry-climate modelling.

Interesting events in 2010

During the year 2010, there will take place several interesting events related to the Atmospheric Sciences:

- EGU (European Geosciences Union, General Assembly 2010), 2-7 May, Vienna, Austria.

- 37th Annual European Meeting on Atmospheric Studies by Optical Methods , 23-27 August, Valladolid, Spain.

- IAC (International Aerosol Conference) , 29 August- 3 September, Helsinki, Finland.

- SPIE Remote Sensing, 20-23 September, Toulouse, France.

- EUMETSAT Meteorological Satellite Conference, 20-24 September, Cordoba, Spain.

New OMI Ozone Profile data release

OMI Ozone Profile data (OMO3PR) is given in terms of the layer-columns of ozone in Dobson Unit (DU) for an 18-layer atmosphere. The layers are nominally bounded by the pressure levels: surface pressure, 700, 500, 300, 200, 150, 100, 70, 50, 30, 20, 10, 7, 5, 3, 2, 1, 0.5, and 0.3 hPa.

Detailed information about this product can be found at:

OMO3PR README File

Full OMO3PR data, as well as subsets of these data over many ground stations and along Aura validation aircraft flights paths are available through the Aura Validation Data Center (AVDC) website

The Cal/Val Wiki Page

The Calibration (Cal) and Validation (Val) Portal of the European Space Agency (ESA) has a very nice tool where the community can edit or insert new topic regarding the Calibration and Validation of Satellite Data. The name is The Cal/Val Wiki Page.

The link to this page is the following: http://calvalportal.ceos.org/cvp/web/guest/cal/val-wiki

Global long-term monitoring of the ozone

My colleague Diego Loyola from German Aerospace Center (DLR) has been just published an interesting article in International Journal of Remote Sensing. This paper demonstrates the importance of a consistent multi-year dataset of total ozone which is composed from different satellite instruments (GOME (ERS-2), SCIAMACHY (ENVISAT), and GOME-2 (METOP-A)). In addition, the paper gives some examples of how to use satellite data products to evaluate model results with respective data derived from observations, and to disclose the abilities and deficiencies of atmospheric models.

View/Download this Publication (PDF, 3 MB)

Interesting events in September 2009

In the next month of September, two important events will take place in Spain:

- The FOURTH INTERCOMPARISON CAMPAIGN OF THE REGIONAL BREWER CALIBRATION CENTER-EUROPE (RBCC-E) in a joint intercomparison campaign with the Regional Dobson Calibration Center-Europe (RDCC-E) will be held at the El Arenosillo Atmospheric Sounding Station - INTA (Huelva) during the period September 7th-17th, 2009

- The ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE CONFERENCE, organised by the European Space Agency in Barcelona, 7-11 September 2009.

Forums of the O3M SAF project

The first products of the Satellite Application Facility on Ozone and Atmospheric Chemistry Monitoring (O3M SAF) (http://o3msaf.fmi.fi) have been declared operational. In this framework, a combined User Forum and Algorithm Forum workshop will be carried out in Greece between 2-4 June, 2009. The aim of the User Forum is to gather feedback from the user community on specific services and products disseminated by the O3M SAF. On the other hand, the aim of the Algorithm forum is to bring together the product developers of the team with other algorithm experts sharing their technical expertise and experience.

The most up-to-date information can be found from the web page:
http://o3msaf.fmi.fi/forum/index.html

Direct SW aerosol radiative forcing over Portugal

The aerosol research team belong to the Geophysics Centre of Évora (Portugal) has published an interesting article in ACP. This paper analyses the evaluation of the aerosol radiative forcing at the top of the atmosphere as well as at the surface over two ground-based stations located at the south of Portugal. The instantaneous direct SW aerosol radiative forcing values obtained at the top of the atmosphere are, in the majority of the cases, negative, indicating a tendency for cooling the Earth at the top of the atmosphere. The average surface direct SW aerosol radiative forcing efficiency is also negative with the more negative values corresponding to forest fire aerosols.

Met-jobs

If you would like to receive regular mailings of job adverts in Atmospheric Science, please visit the Met-jobs mailing list

To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the Met-jobs Archives.

Ozone Monitoring Instrument

The OMI satellite instrument is a contribution of the Netherlands's Agency for Aerospace Programs (NIVR) in collaboration with the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), and it is onboard NASA EOS/Aura platform launched in July 2004. This remote sensing UV spectrometer continues currently with the measurements recorded by the NASA Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) instrument which was operative on board of two satellites: Nimbus-7 (1978-1993) and Earth Probe (EP) (1996-2005).

The total ozone column over many locations (in Spain: Badajoz, El Arenosillo, Madrid and Valencia ) can be obtained in the following ftp site:

ftp://toms.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/omi/data/overpass

Active fire monitoring over continental Portugal

The Active Fire Monitoring (FIR) is a product that displays information on the presence of fire within a pixel and it is obtained directly from the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). The information for continental Portugal is made available in this page in near real time (15 to 20 minutes delay) with a spatial resolution of 3×3km².

Valencia Anchor Station

Valencia Anchor Station (VAS) is an automatic meteorological station equipped with a large number of instruments to carry out validation activities of remote sensing data and products . It is located at about 80 km from the city of Valencia (Spain) in a reasonably homogeneous and flat area of about 50x50 km2.

The main scientific objectives of the VAS are:

• Definition of a large scale validation area for low-spatial resolution missions.
• Definition and characterisation of a large scale reference pixel.
• Study of scaling issues. Time Interpolation and Spatial Averaging.

VAS takes part in validation and calibration activities of satellite sensors corresponding to several missions such as EarthCARE (Earth Clouds, Aerosols and Radiation Explorer) and CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System).

More information in its web:

• Valencia Anchor Station

GOME-2 Team

I would like to write about the group within which I am currently doing a research stay. The GOME-2 Team at DLR belongs to Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF) . Its main research topics are related with the algorithm development in order to obtain total columns products of ozone, minor trace gases and cloud properties. These satellite products are generated at DLR in the framework of the Satellite Application Facility on Ozone and Atmospheric Chemistry Monitoring (O3M SAF).

The Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 (GOME-2) is one of the new-generation European instruments carried on MetOp-A (launched in October 2006). It continues the long-term monitoring of atmospheric trace gases started by GOME on ERS-2 and SCIAMACHY on Envisat.

German Aerospace Center (DLR)

Currently, I am a visiting scientist at Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF) at DLR in Wessling near to Munich (Germany). The research stay will last until the end of January 2008 and it focus on the ozone data comparison between GOME-2 satellite instrument and Brewer spectroradiometers in Iberian Peninsula.

This research stay is a continuation of a O3-SAF VS Activity carried out the past year which was summarized in this report:

• Validation of total ozone GOME data with measurments of Spanish Brewer Network

More information in the following links:

• O3-SAF Project


• GOME-2 sensor