Announcements / News

JAIVEX Conclusion Notes:

May 8th, 2007 by waynef

From Bill Smith Sr (NAST-I/S-HIS Scientist)

Thank you Jon for saying it so well.

JAIVEx is a complete success. Today, the last flight of JAIVEx took place. The airborne mission was to underfly both MetOp and Aqua over the same track over the Gulf of Mexico. This mission also included, during the time between the MetOp and Aqua orbits, an intercomparison of the Interferometers and Microwave sensors on the BAe-146 and WB-57 flying along the same track, at the same altitude and nearly the “same” time. All indications are that this final JAIVEx mission was a total success, and the weather cooperated (i.e., clear skies over the ocean target area). What a finale to a great mission!

The aircraft and ground-based (CART-site) science data sets obtained during JAVEx in conjunction with the MetOp and A-train overpasses will be used for many years to come to understand and advance the state of the art of surface and atmospheric remote sensing. There is more coordinated satellite and airborne hyperspectral surface and atmospheric remote sensing data in the JAIVEx data set than ever collected before. We need to validate and make these data available to our students and colleagues, as soon as practical for it contains an enormous amount of thesis and journal publication material. We all look forward to analyzing the JAIVEx data and seeing each other’s results during the months ahead.

The JAIVEx success is the result of the generous cooperation and contributions of the many individuals and institutions, on both sides of the Atlantic, who participated in it.

JAIVEx turned out to be absolutely spectacular!

Thanks to all …………..

——

From Jon Taylor (AIRES PI)

I wanted to thank everyone involved in the JAIVEX campaign for their hard work and dedication. Despite some early problems with IASI Eumetsat and CNES came up trumps with returning Metop to nominal operations and we have between us gathered an extremely useful data set for validation not only of IASI but also several other instruments on the Metop satellite.

The initial results are extremely encouraging and really show the potential for validation of satellite instruments using two state of the art research aircraft.

I look forward to working with you in the analysis of the data over the coming months and look forward to showing our data to the international community at the Joint AMS/Eumetsat conference in Amsterdam this coming September. It looks like we will have a busy summer of work ahead of us.

Thanks to you all,

Jon Taylor.

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Overview

The Joint Airborne IASI Validation Experiment is an international cal/val campaign in support of the NPOESS and MetOp series of operational satellites. Although all measurements on the MetOp-A and A-train satellites are of interest, the focus of JAIVEx is on the validation of radiance observations and meteorological products from the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer, IASI. IASI, on MetOp-A launched 19 October, 2006, is the first of the advanced ultra-spectral resolution temperature, humidity, and trace gas sounding instruments to be flown on the Joint Polar System (JPS) of NPOESS and MetOp operational satellites for the purpose of improved weather, climate, and air quality observation and forecasting. IASI measures radiation emission from the surface and atmosphere in the 645 – 2760 cm-1 (i.e., 3.6-15.5 μm) spectral band with high spectral resolution (i.e., 8461 spectral channels with a spacing of 0.25 cm-1). As MetOp-A orbits overhead, IASI scans the Earth between ± 49° providing a swath of data across the Earth of 2132 km. The scan swaths are made with a frequency to provide contiguous coverage across the Earth’s surface as the satellite orbits overhead. Seven consecutive orbits, each with a 101 minute period, provides total Earth coverage every twelve hours. The aircraft being employed are the NASA WB-57 and the FAAM BAe 146.The aircraft base location, dates of the experiment, satellite, airborne, and surface resources being used for JAIVEx, as well as the participants and sponsors, are summarized below.
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