Aerosol News
March 30, 2005
The April 2005 issue of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences contains the Chesapeake Lighthouse Airborne Measurements for Satellites (CLAMS) special issue. The CLAMS experiment took place at Wallops Flight Facility and Langley Research Center from July 10 to August 3, 2001. The special issue contains contributions that describe aerosol and surface characterization from aircraft and from ground stations, as well as descriptions and evaluation of various satellite retrieval methods. Satellite sensor teams who participated at CLAMS include MODIS, MISR and CERES. Among the papers that will appear in this special issue are several from authors connected with the Climate and Radiation Branch. Full Story

MODIS Cloud Optical and Microphysical Retrieval Product
March 23, 2005
The latest MODIS code update (Collection 5) will provide improved retrievals over land and snow/ice surfaces and contain fewer false positives for sunglint and heavy dust/smoke aerosol scenes. More realistic ice cloud models have been included. In addition, quantitative pixel-level uncertainties for a limited, but important, subset of error sources are now provided.

The Collection 5 development effort was implemented over the course of a year-and-a-half with contributions from the Earth-Sun Exploration Division (M. D. King) and Climate & Radiation Branch (S. Platnick, M. Gray, G. Wind, B. Wind, G. T. Arnold, et al.) personnel.

Further information on the MODIS cloud product and browse imagery can be found here. Full Story

Land-surface model development and testing
March 16, 2005
Goddard scientists are developing a unified land surface model, for use within a general circulation model (GCM) or as a stand-alone model forced with observed surface data. The unified model will include the most detailed and best performing components of the various land models in use and previously developed at Goddard. These models have been put into the Land Information System (LIS) framework for testing and evaluation. In addition to CLM2 (Common Land Model 2), which was already within LIS, the models coupled to LIS were the Catchment model, SiB2 (Simple Biosphere 2), and HY-SSiB
(HYdrology with Simplified Simple Biosphere). HY-SSiB was developed and is in use within the Climate and Radiation Branch. Full Story

IPCC Workshop Held March 1-4, 2005
March 10, 2005
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group I held an International Workshop on IPCC AR4 Model Analysis on March 1-4, 2005 in Honolulu, Hawaii. This is an international effort to collect, compile, and analyze outputs from various new generation coupled General Circulation Models (GCM) to assess model performance and sensitivity to various external forcings under different climate change scenarios, in preparation for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. Full Story

Spatially complete global spectral surface albedos: Value-added datasets derived from Terra MODIS land products
March 4, 2005
A paper by Eric Moody et al., on the development of a spatially complete global spectral surface albedo maps for use by the remote sensing and modeling communities was published in the January issue of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. The technique applies dynamic ecosystem-based interpolation methods to the operational MODIS spectral albedo product. Full Story

Aerosol-Clouds Precipitation Workshop
March 4, 2005
Several Climate & Radiation Branch members (Ilan Koren, Vanderlei Martins, Lorraine Remer, Alexander Marshak, Zev Levin and Yoram Kaufman), and participants from NOAA and NCAR attended a workshop on aerosol-clouds and precipitation organized by Ilan Koren (UMBC/GSFC) and Chidong Zhang (University of Miami). The workshop was a unique get together of a small group of satellite, laboratory, aircraft measurements and modeling (from cloud resolved models to GCMs) experts. Full Story