The Investigators Working Group (IWG) meeting was held recently in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and focused on two major themes: (i) innovative ways to implement the EOS Program in the post-2000 era, and (ii) progress on developing an EOS Science Implementation Plan. This was the first opportunity for the vast majority of EOS investigators to learn about recent studies (reported in the last issue of The Earth Observer): (i) to foster greater collaboration between NASA's research and development missions and NOAA's operational missions, especially the converged National Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS C-1), to be ready for launch in 2004, (ii) to develop an observational and programmatic strategy for the follow-on missions to the first 24 measurement sets (land vegetation, ice sheet elevation, chemistry of the stratosphere, ocean surface wind fields, etc.), (iii) to incorporate advances in technology into EOS to save money and improve data gathering, and (iv) to identify a program including EOSDIS, algorithm development, and spaceflight hardware that fits within a post-2000 cost cap.
At the follow-up Payload Panel meeting, held June 29, the scientific community endorsed a strategy for characterizing each EOS measurement into one of four categories: (i) those requiring continuous observations, (ii) those that permit intermittent observations with data gaps, (iii) measurements that are unique and permit one-of-a-kind observations, and (iv) initial science. The Implementation Science Team that I chaired had previously developed a strategy for identifying measurements as falling into categories of monitoring vs process studies, but the IWG wanted to define the broader set of categories outlined above. The charge to the various EOS disciplinary panels in the next few months will be to articulate and expand on this strategy for all EOS observations, and to refine these definitions at a Payload Panel meeting this fall.
NASA has been negotiating with the European Space Agency (ESA) for the past several years, in full anticipation that ESA would provide a Multi-frequency Imaging Microwave Radiometer (MIMR) to NASA for the EOS PM-1 spacecraft. It has now been determined by both ESA and NASA, that MIMR cannot be committed, developed, and provided in time for a PM-1 delivery; hence, both agencies have agreed to abandon MIMR as an international instrument on NASA's PM-1 platform. Dr. Charles Kennel, Associate Administrator of the Office of Mission to Planet Earth, has formally requested the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) to provide AMSR, a comparable conical scanning microwave radiometer, for launch on PM-1. NASDA is currently examining accommodation of a revised copy of AMSR, being developed for launch on ADEOS II in August 1999, for the PM-1 spacecraft (to be launched in December 2000). NASDA is also developing a cost, schedule, and accommodation impact for the Science and Technology Agency's budget review in August.
In the past month, the 1995 edition of the Mission to Planet Earth/Earth Observing System (MTPE/EOS) Reference Handbook was completed and published. This much-expanded edition includes enhanced descriptions of the Interdisciplinary Science Investigations (IDS), an up-to-date description of the national and international Earth Observing System, a new section describing EOS Data Quality, including calibration, validation, and quality assurance, and, for the first time, a description of the EOS data products to be produced by each Instrument Team.
This document, as well as the recently completed EOS Posters and Earth Observing System Educators' Visual Materials, has been added to the World Wide Web (http://spso.gsfc.nasa.gov/ spso_homepage.html), thereby enabling on-line access to the latest information about EOS science implementation, strategy, and individual investigators. The MTPE/EOS Reference Handbook, as well as Algorithm Theoretical Basis Documents (ATBDs) for seven Science Teams, have been incorporated into World Wide Web using Adobe Acrobat PDF (portable document format) so that anyone with Acrobat Reader, a freely-distributed pdf reader, can view these documents from any Macintosh, Windows, or UNIX-based platform.
Finally, I would like to express my thanks, on behalf of the Earth Science community, for the marvelous job that Dr. Berrien Moore has done as chairman of the EOS Payload Panel since 1990. He has been both an even-handed and diplomatic chairman of the most influential panel of EOS, which consists of the principal investigators and team leaders of all EOS instrument and interdisciplinary science teams. He has been called upon frequently to convene the Payload Panel to consider and recommend new implementation strategies to NASA management as the EOS program has evolved. These meetings have involved prioritizing instruments and measurements, launch sequences, international and interagency areas of cooperation, reordering sensors on a given platform to optimize the scientific return of the mission, EOSDIS implementation strategies, and, most recently, a coordinated approach to convergence of NASA, NOAA, and DoD's polar orbiting environmental satellite systems for the next millennium. Berrien is succeeded by Dr. Mark Abbott, recently elected chair by the voting members of the IWG. Mark, like Berrien, is a principal investigator of an Interdisciplinary Science Team, and, in addition, is a Team Member of MODIS, with a special interest in biological oceanography.
In accordance with the by-laws of the IWG, four other EOS Panels recently held elections for new chairs. I am happy to report the election of Dr. Richard Rood to chair the Modeling Panel (succeeding Dr. Robert Dickinson), Dr. Richard Zurek to chair the Atmospheres Panel (succeeding Dr. Dennis Hartmann), Dr. Jim Yoder to chair the Oceans Panel (succeeding Dr. Drew Rothrock), and Dr. John Melack to chair the Biogeochemical Cycles Panel (succeeding Dr. David Schimel). These panel chair assignments represent a considerable time investment by these members of the EOS community, requiring attendance at bimonthly meetings of the Science Executive Committee (SEC), and thereby enabling frequent feedback and guidance to the EOS Project and Program Offices.
--Michael King
EOS Senior Project Scientist