I am happy to report that Dr. David Starr of the Climate and Radiation Branch at Goddard Space Flight Center has agreed to be the EOS Validation Scientist. This will be an especially important position that will benefit from Starr's experience as lead scientist for the cirrus component of the First ISCCP Regional Experiment (FIRE), itself an element of the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP). The duties and responsibilities of the EOS Validation Scientist will include (i) working closely with various EOS science teams to coordinate airborne and surface experiments aimed at developing precursor data sets to be used in algorithm development, (ii) helping teams obtain information necessary to construct an appropriate error covariance matrix associated with their EOS data products, and (iii) coordinating with national and international field programs such as the Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites, and the WCRP Global Baseline Radiation Network (GBRN).
Although the EOS instrument science teams are responsible for validation of the algorithms and data products they produce, it is nevertheless important to identify the necessary steps required to validate their respective data products on specific space and time scales. Intercomparison of similar data products developed by different instruments based on different techniques must be coordinated by the respective instrument science teams. David Starr will coordinate these intercomparisons with the EOS community through his participation in the Data Quality Panel, chaired by Michael Freilich.
There is now an Investigators Working Group (IWG) meeting scheduled for June 27-29 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The primary focus of this meeting is to (i) learn of recent progress and exciting accomplishments obtained thus far by various EOS investigations, including four-dimensional data assimilation and ocean topography, (ii) to discuss and revise chapters of an EOS Science Implementation Plan that is being coordinated by the Science Executive Committee (SEC), and (iii) to discuss plans for calibration and validation of EOS instruments and data products, and the role of an EOS correlative measurement program to be included in the pending Announcement of Opportunity (AO).
Work is in progress to update the EOS Reference Handbook and to develop a complementary EOS Data Products Handbook that will describe the data sets that will be available from EOSDIS for the TRMM and EOS AM-1 launches scheduled for 1997 and 1998, respectively. These important documents should be available in time for the IWG meeting.
EOS Senior Project Scientist