SIRTA: A French Observation Site for Atmospheric Remote Sensing
Haeffelin, M., Chepfer, H., Delaval, A., Drobinski, P., Protat, A., and Sauvage, L., Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Paris, France
Twelfth Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Science Team Meeting
An observation site for atmospheric remote sensing (SIRTA) was put together in Palaiseau, France (20 km south of Paris), in 1999. This site hosts a suite of passive and active remote sensing instruments such as a 532 and 1064-nm back-scattering lidar with polarization, a 10.6-micron wind profiling lidar, a 95-GHz cloud radar, a 5-GHz precipitation radar, microwave, longwave, infrared, shortwave and U.V. radiometers and a weather station. The activities around the site involve a large number of scientists, engineers, technicians and information technologists from several French national research laboratories in the Paris area. Scientific themes driving the needs for such a site are for example: - dynamics, thermodynamics, and microphysics of clouds - radiative forcing of clouds and aerosols - dynamics in the planetary boundary layer and the water cycle - urban pollution - satellite radar/lidar validation and methodology. In addition, SIRTA has an educational responsibility towards the colleges and universities in the Paris area in the field of atmospheric remote sensing. A structure of data acquisition, quality control, thorough documentation, operational data analysis, and data distribution is now under development around an existing reliable archival and computational system. Today SIRTA is involved in several long-term field observation programs such as EARLINET (a lidar network in 21 European sites dedicated to aerosol studies) and CLOUDNET (a combined lidar/radar observation campaign in 3 European sites dedicated to reducing the uncertainties associated with the representation of clouds in models). SIRTA is also actively involved in the development of the GEWEX working group on atmospheric profiling whose aim is to improve the quality and usefulness of ground-based remote sensing data.
Note: This is the poster abstract presented at the meeting; an extended version was not provided by the author(s).
