20th OMI Science Meeting at NASA Goddard Space Institute

During 3 days, from 12 to 14 September 2017, I had the pleasure to attend, with my KNMI colleagues from the R&D satellite department, the 20th OMI Science Team Meeting hosted by NASA Goddard Space Institute in Greenbelt MD (close to Washington DC) in the USA.

Group picture at NASA, Goddard Space Institute, Greenbelt MD, Virginia, USA, 2017.09.13 in front the morning and A-Train satellite constellation, with all our OMI colleagues.

Despite its quite advance age for a satellite mission (13 years old!), OMI is still delivering remarkable measurements about our atmospheric composition and air quality. So many talks and discussions on the aerosol global record over cloud-free scenes and above clouds, decade global volcanic SO2 – Sulfur dioxide missions, the use of OMI data by air quality model simulations to inform air quality policy, the case studies on emissions monitoring and to support authorities and clean-tech industry, the new generation of the Quality Assurance For Essential Climate Variables (QA4ECV), the evolution in the ozone trends and related mechanisms, and of course the future with the forthcoming TROPOMI (Sentinel-5 Precursor) mission, TEMPO (NASA Geostationary) and TROPOLITE.

I was honoured to present the status of our work on the retrieval of aerosol layer height from the OMI visible band using machine learning technique, and the results with single day CALIOP aerosol along-track observations.

**Chimot J.**, Veefkind P., van Ouwerkerk G., Vlemmix T., Levelt P., Aerosol layer height retrieval from OMI and neural network- Possibility for a 13-year time series?, 20^th OMI Science Team Meeting, NASA Goddard, Greenbelt MD, Virginia, USA, 2017.09.12 (Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319678283_Aerosol_layer_height_from_OMI_and_neural_network_Possibility_of_a_13-year_time_series)

Several nice social moments accompanied us during these 3 days:

The Nationals baseball game on Wednesday 13th September evening in Washington DC

The guided tour by NASA during lunch break, a great opportunity to see the control rooms of the Aura (OMI spacecraft!!), Aqua and Landsat missions!

I am very grateful to all the organizers for this inspiring meeting, and my current promotors (Dr. Pepijn Veefkind, Prof. Dr. Pieternel Levelt & Dr. Tim Vlemmix)!

In spite of being glad of having been part of this adventure, I cannot stop myself thinking this may have been my very last OMI conference, before finishing my current research project and starting new professional & personal adventures (still in satellite & atmospheric community of course!). But this last point will be specifically mentioned later in future weeks. Stay tuned!

More information?

OMI webpage here
QA4ECV project here
20th OMI Science Team Meeting here
TROPOMI on-board Sentinel-5 precursor: Counting down towards the launch of TROPOMI & UK & EU’s Earth observation space – COPERNICUS – No Brexit!
OMI Aerosol layer height retrieval: AMT publication paper here, past presentations at the NASA A-Train symposium here & EGU 2017 here
TROPOMI, on-board Sentinel-5 Precursor, Website here, & WebPage here
Aerosol WebPage here
NO2 WebPage here