Science Team Meeting Archive
Note: These AIRS presentations have not been subsequently revised or corrected, and therefore may contain occasional inaccuracies. If a link is not active, we did not receive permission to post.
November 6-9, 2001
MEETING SUMMARY - written by George Aumann, AIRS Project Scientist
The AIRS Science Team held a very successful and informative meeting from 6-9 November 2001 at the Oldtown Marriott in Pasadena, CA. Click for details of the Agenda and Attendee names/affiliation and email addresses. The meeting was structures into a general meeting and three topical meetings: Direct Data Assimilation, Early Level 1b evaluation, and Geophysical Core Product Validation (level 2).
Avi Karnik, AIRS Project Manager, reported on the overall project status. The spacecraft and all instruments on the EOS Aqua have sucessfully completed the Thermal Vacuum (TVAC) testing at TRW. AIRS showed excellent performance. Detail on the AIRS TVAC Results were presented by Tom Pagano, AIRS Calibration Team (ACT) leader. The nominal launch date from Vandenberg is 24 March 2002 at 1:30 am. The launch date will be finalized after liens from the TVAC testing are resolved.
Steve Friedman, AIRS Team Leader Data System (TDS) Manager, presented details of the development and testing of the AIRS Data Product Generation Software (PGS). The final prelaunch AIRS data processing software, V.2.1.6, has been delivered to the DAAC. The next delivery ( V.2.2.0) is scheduled at launch + 2 months. Larry McMillin, AIRS Science team member from NOAA/NESDIS, presented details of the tuning software, i.e. the systematic elimination of the bias between calculated and observed, and outlined the steps required before "tuning" can be turned on. Joel Susskind, AIRS team member from GSFC, presented the the status of the level 2 (part of the V2.1.6 software) and the convergence betwen the V2.1.6 software and the GSFC test bed software. Both the accuracy and yield (using the V.2.2.0 simulated data) is considerably better than anything achieved previously. RMS temperature errors for accepted cases (72.2% of all cases) were better than 0.9K at all levels
and the RMS skin temperature error was 0.4K. Results for all accepted cases were only slightly poorer than results for cases in which the truth was "clear", that is, cloudiness was less than 2% (12.6% of the cases). Mike Gunson, Team Leader Science Computing Facility, summarized the status of the level 2 software based on results from the October 2001 Science data exercise. Based on the 15 December 2000 simulated data the level 2 software meets the 1K/1km requirement under up to 80% cloudy conditions.
The next AIRS Science team meeting will be hosted by NOAA/NEDIS at the FOB#4, Suitland, MD, 12 - 14 February 2002.