Following the past symposia in Lille, France in 2007 and in New Orleans in 2010, the 3rd NASA A-Train symposium was held on 19-21 April in Pasadena (California, USA). The NASA A-Train is a unique afternoon constellation including a high value series of instruments (Aqua (2002), Aura (2004), PARASOL (2004), CALIPSO (2006), CloudSat (2006), GCOM-W1 (2012) and OCO-2 (2014)) observing our atmosphere.
I was honoured to give a talk, on Thursday 20 April on our recently achieved developments related to the OMI aerosol layer height neural network development (Chimot et al., 2017) and its applications to urban pollution and biomass burning events. Many exchanges allow me to think further about 1) the difficulties, even for LIDAR space-borne sensors, to entirely probe smoke aerosol layers, 2) the possibility to inter-compare OMI and OCO-2 aerosol layer height products in the future.
A lot of talks and posters were focused on their contributions to our aerosol and cloud cycle knowledge, and the forthcoming new generation of satellite instruments such as 3MI on MetOp-SG and the new LIDAR EarthCare. Discussions were also held on the recently launched Chinese mission TANSAT, devoted to CO2 observation, which plans to join the constellation soon. With the American mission OCO-2, there will be 2 satellite missions focusing on the atmospheric carbon cycle!
Finally, it is worth noting the very interesting & inspiring discussion led by Dr. Bruce Wieliecki on the economic value of climate science. Obviously, this is a burning and still very open topic. And it is hard to reach a consensus in our community. But if we want to convince the society with business key words, the (huge!) return of investment of a new climate observing system should then be more quantitatively emphasized to initiate concrete actions.
Great thanks to all the organizers of this symposium (in particular to Liz Juvera) and to all the instrument PIs of the A-Train constellation!
More information?
- 3rd NASA A-Train symposium 2017 here
- Talk at the 3rd NASA A-Train symposium: Chimot J., Veefkind P., Vlemmix T., de Haan J., Levelt P., Aerosol layer height retrieval from OMI+MODIS – A neural network approach, 3rd NASA A-Train symposium, Pasadena, California, USA, 2017.04.20 (Talk) here
- Chimot et al., 2017: Chimot, J., Veefkind, J. P., Vlemmix, T., de Haan, J. F., Amiridis, V., Proestakis, E., Marinou, E., and Levelt, P. F.: An exploratory study on the aerosol height retrieval from OMI measurements of the 477 nm O2 − O2 spectral band using a neural network approach, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 10, 783-809, doi:10.5194/amt-10-783-2017, 2017 here
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