Improved Limb Atmospheric Spectrometer ADEOS / ILAS. No.33

Transcription

1 Improved Limb Atmospheric Spectrometer ADEOS / ILAS No.33

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4 I was in fact visiting the home site of ILAS (for real, not through the web!) to cooperate in validation studies as well as to help Sebastien Payan, a young post-doc working with me at LPMA in Paris. He was an awardee of the Science and Technology Agency visiting programme of the Japanese Government to work in Tsukuba on the ILAS project. Together with Sebastien, we were involved in validation studies of the ILAS algorithms and in detailed comparisons of the ILAS profiles with those retrieved during the ILAS validation campaign from Kiruna, using the Limb Profile Monitor of the Atmosphere instrument, a balloon-borne Fourier transform infrared spectrometer operating in absorption using the sun as a source (as ILAS). As compared to other space experiments involving a large number of scientists and engineers, the ILAS project team working around Y. Sasano, is almost of the family type: the scientists and staff share the same rather big room, separated by book-shelves into smaller working areas packed with documents and stuffed with computer screens and keyboards. There is no dedicated meeting room, but a big table is the central point where working sessions of small groups can be held and where coffee is served by very nice secretaries with cookies at 3:00 sharp. This informal get-together is a good opportunity to be introduced to others, to talk science (just a little since this is a social meeting), to discuss of the various aspects of the Japanese way of life or of the next expected typhoon and to get information about restaurants where the menu is available with English subtitles! A further opportunity to meet people (and even the Director of the Institute) was the annual food and drinking party of NIES which luckily took place during my stay, just before the third week of Aug. (a period when many Japanese leave for a short vacation). Another very interesting place was the data handling facility (DHF) where the ILAS data are received from NASDA, stored and processed operationally with a very powerful cluster of RISC processors. This is a newly installed facility maintained by Fujitsu FIP personnel (with restricted access, but T. Yokota or Y. Itou would welcome you in the area for a short visit or specific technical discussions). After a long period spent in the cold Arctic winter during the ILAS validation balloon campaign, it was very rewarding to meet again in the "Science City" with H. Kanzawa, Y. Sasano, M. Suzuki and others during the hot summer (not too warm this year) and to appreciate the progress made in the ILAS retrieval algorithms (the version 3 data were just coming out and test version 4 profiles were being produced for specific comparisons with balloon flight results). NIES is an interesting place to visit offering good opportunities for scientific cooperation with a motivated team. Very powerful computing facilities are available to test and run software for retrieval and science studies. The place is very friendly open for visitors (no badge as in NASA or CNES) and you can meet scientists from all over the world. I met for example two young visiting scientists from New Zealand, K. Kreher and G. Bodeker with whom Sebastien and myself had very interesting discussions on the ozone profiles and the polar vortex. The ILAS experiment has been a very successful experiment on board the ADEOS satellite and the NIES processing team was keeping up very efficiently with the flow of data acquired each day. The failure of the spacecraft is a pity, but the continuous operation of ILAS during almost 8 months, gathered a huge amount of data. Once validated with profiles obtained during the intensive validation campaign involving balloon, but also ground-based, aircraft and other space experiments (all these results were discussed in the Validation meeting at CNES in Paris on Sept. 18 / 19, see the first item of this NEWSLETTER), the ILAS data will certainly represent a reference data set for stratospheric ozone and related species (including aerosols) in the high latitude regions. As a conclusion, I appreciated very much my stay at NIES with the ILAS team and I cannot name all who were very helpful and friendly. I just like to mention T. Nishimura who provided a very useful tool, for those not wanting to take the risk to drive a car in Japan (on the left side, with

5 directions in an unknown language!). A bike is indeed the best way to move in a town like Tsukuba and it was a very unusual but enjoyable experience, after hours spent in front of a computer screen, to ride at night along the pathways, from NIES to Suwa Hotel (where I was staying), in the middle of ricefields full of singing insects and "gamma" toads. I warmly recommend this to future visitors if they want to have a true feeling of the deep and traditional Japan! Claude Camy-Peyret LPMA / Paris 10 / 6

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8 News from the ILAS Project Leader (August 21 - October 16, 1997) ILAS (October 16, 1997) <Information on the next ILAS Science Team meeting> The 13 th ILAS Science Team meeting will be held on January 28 and 29, 1998 in Sendai, Japan, as a part of the third ADEOS Symposium/Workshop. Attached below is a general information on the ADEOS Symposium/Workshop recently distributed by NASDA. All the ILAS colleagues are invited to these meetings. In the ILAS Science Team meeting, the main topics will be on validation analyses using Version 4 (or higher) data products as well as some results of very preliminary scientific analyses. We will inform you of further details later. <Announcement by NASDA regarding Third ADEOS Workshop> NASDA, EA and MITI will hold the Third ADEOS Workshop at the Sendai International Center from January 26 (Monday) through January 30 (Friday), (1) The Plenary Sessions will be held on January 26 and January 27. On January 26, ADEOS failure cause, data status and action item review will be reported by EA, MITI, NASA, CNES and NASDA. Some selected ADEOS Science papers will be presented on January 27. (2) Sensor teams and science teams will meet on January 28 and January 29 and in the morning of January 30. If you wish to make a presentation in your sensor or science team meeting, please contact your team leader as soon as possible. (3) The closing session will be held in the afternoon of January 30, and results of team discussion meetings will be reported in the closing session. Sendai, located approximately 300 km north of Tokyo, is now the largest city north of Tokyo with a population of about 1 million. It takes 1 hour and 40 minutes to travel from Tokyo to Sendai by Tohoku Shinkansen Bullet Train. The Sendai International Center is located in west Sendai, 10 minutes by bus or 25 minutes on foot from the Sendai Station. ADEOS PIs and members of sensor teams and science teams will receive detailed information such as the provisional agenda, registration instructions, and hotel reservations by the middle of November. If you are not an ADEOS PI but wish to participate in the Workshop, please contact the Secretariat of the Third ADEOS Workshop: Ms. Tomoko Maruyama Secretariat of the Third ADEOS Workshop Analysis and Research Department Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan (RESTEC) Roppongi First Building, 14F 1-9-9, Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106, Japan FAX: tomoko@restec.or.jp Notes

9 (1) Please note that NASDA generally does not provide financial support for Workshop attendees. (2) Citizens of countries that do not have Reciprocal Visa Exemption Arrangements with Japan must obtain a visa from a Japanese Embassy or Consulate before entering Japan. Sometimes it takes over a month to obtain a visa. If you wish to attend this Workshop and you must obtain a visa or you do not know whether a visa is necessary or not, please contact a Japanese Embassy or Consulate in your country as soon as possible. Citizens of China and countries which composed the former Soviet Union, such as the Russia Federation and the Ukraine, are strongly recommended to quickly contact the Secretariat of the Workshop, because it takes an especially long time for them to obtain an entry visa to Japan. (September 9, 1997) I would like to ask all the presentators at the ILAS Paris Meeting on 18 and 19 September 1997 to bring one copy of the presentation materials (transparencies) to the meeting place. Those copies will be archived as a meeting record and also internally used by the Chiefs of Validation Analysis to overview the results presented by different groups. I would like to recommend the following size and scales, if possible, for plotting data in graphs to make them common to each other, which may be convenient when comparing each other plot. Many of the ILAS data are plotted in this unified format at our side. [Vertical axis for altitude] length: 22.5 cm (9 in), range: 0-50 (km) [Horizontal axis for measurement parameters] length: 15.0 cm (6 in), range and parameter: (K) for temperature, (hpa) for pressure in a logarithmic scale, 0 to 8.0 (ppmv) for O3, 0 to 0.01 (ppmv) for NO2, 0 to (ppmv) for HNO3, 0 to 0.4 (ppmv) for N2O, 0 to 3.0 (ppmv) for CH4, 0 to 12.0 (ppmv) for H2O, 0 to (ppmv) for CFC11, 0 to (ppmv) for CFC12, 1. E-7 to 1.E-1 (km-1) for extinction coefficients (September 2, 1997) <Preparation for Paris meeting> The ILAS Paris Meeting (ILAS Validation Experiments Interim Report Meeting, Paris, September 1997) is coming soon. I believe many of you, who are going to attend the meeting, are working hard to prepare for presentation materials. I hope the presentations will be made not only to report your experiment results but also to show comparison results between your data and ILAS data. I believe many of you have already accessed to ILAS Version 3.00 products which are available through the ILAS home page. If you have not, please contact to our ILAS DHF Operation Manager <admdhf@ilasris.nies.go.jp> for a use ID and try to get ILAS data. The registration procedure can be found in the publication (ILAS & RIS Data Handling Facility USAGE GUIDE) which are also available through the ILAS home page. (August 21, 1997) <Additional information on ILAS Validation Experiments Interim Report Meeting (Paris, September 1997)> General information (travel, map, etc.) on the meeting in addition to the tentative agenda, participants list and hotel information are available from the ILAS homepage at < (August 18, 1997) Revised products (Version 3.00) of the preliminary data from the ILAS instrument are ready for provision to the registered researchers for the purposes of data quality evaluation, algorithm studies, and validation analysis. These data are available through ILAS Home Page <www-ilas.nies.go.jp>. The ILAS DHF is giving the priority in data processing to the data obtained at those particular days when the in situ validation measurements (balloons, ozone sondes, etc.) were made. Therefore, the Level 2 products corresponding to those days are currently being made available. Since the database is updated regularly (about twice a week), it is recommended to check the data availability regularly by submitting an inventory search request in the ILAS home page. For scientific content of the data and technical matters such as data formats, please refer to the ILAS User's Handbook. The ILAS & RIS Data Handling Facility USAGE GUIDE should also be referred to for detailed information on how to get an ID and a password for on-line users and how to access ILAS data. Copies of these documents were already sent to the registered researchers such as ILAS Science Team members,

10 Validation Experiment Team members, and Principal Investigators selected through Joint Research Announcement activities conducted jointly by NASDA, MITI and Environmental Agency. The documents are also available from the ILAS home page. Please click "ILAS Publication" in the home page at <www-ilas.nies.go.jp>. Tel Fax sasanonies.go.jp Tel Fax iida-hnies.go.jp