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Recent Publications and Presentations |
13th August 1997
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Panel members were:
The panel discussion was well-attended by more than 120 participants from Europe, Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere. Numerous questions and excellent comments were received from the audience, which included representatives of government and intergovernmental organizations, private industry, and academia.
My fuller Report of the panel session is available as are the Introductory Vugraphs we presented as a ActiveX Powerpoint Presentation. (How to load and use an ActiveX Viewer).
The requirements for characterisation and validation of operational satellite instruments will be covered and the more stringent requirements of the climate user for continuity, high absolute accuracy calibration and consistency in quality and error characteristics over long time periods will be brought out. In particular the needs for inter-comparison of instruments within the same series and between instruments of different types both prior to launch and by validation campaigns after launch will be addressed. The UK Met Office's ground based characterisation facilities and airborne instrumentation covering the next generation of operational passive microwave instruments will be described with some examples of results from the current test programme. The impacts of increasingly sophisticated uses of the data, including assimilation schemes, on instrument design and test programmes will be discussed.
Dr Peter Curtis is currently Head of the Remote Sensing Branch of the UK Meteorological Office with a staff of 25 working on satellites with an additional 10 working on radar and other ground based remote sensing. The work covers research using airborne instrumentation on the C130, procurement of the AMSU-B instruments due to start operational flight later this year, calibration and characterization of satellite instruments, a studies programme on new techniques and systems and representation on many of the committees of the Space Agencies. He is the delegate to the EUMETSAT Scientific and Technical Group (STG) and a Delegate to Council. He is a delegate to the ESA Programme Board for Earth Observation (PB-EO) and is a member of a number of ESA, EUMETSAT and UK expert groups and project boards. He works part time at the British National Space Centre (BNSC) and is the Met Office representative on the BNSC Earth Observation Programme Board (EOPB).
He has worked in the Satellite field for 25 years starting with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics at Oxford University where he worked on the ESCR, PMR and SAMS instruments for upper atmosphere temperature and composition measurement on the NASA Nimbus series of spacecraft and did the preliminary designs for the Stratospheric Sounding Unit (SSU) still flying as an operational meteorology instrument on the NOAA series. He has had an end-to-end involvement covering, specification, design, implementation, calibration and in-orbit evaluation. He has worked at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory of the Science and Engineering Research Council being Instrument Scientist on ATSR, Project leader for UK on MLS, Manager of the EO and astronomy Technology Programmes, Manager of the environmental test facilities and leader of the Microwave Technology Group. He moved to the Meteorological Office 6 years ago.
The views are entirely those of the authors and do not represent any other organisations. Copyright © Peter and Pauline Curtis Most recent significant revision: 22th March, 1998 30th December, 2002 |