Leicester Telecon 3

Chris Merchant, Mark Filipiak and (by telephone) Gary Corlett

GC reported that the Data Access Requirements Document is essentially assembled, having received comments back, including additional of data of relevance to high latitudes recommended by Scandinavian colleagues.

The outline of the Product Validation Plan has been sent to parties who are contributing parts of that plan.

Regarding the multi-sensor match-up data (MMD), all the required inputs from Meteo France are collected and complete up to September 2010. The creation of the ATSR matches to different in situ data sources is almost completed, including the additional data sets from Scandinavian colleagues. The tools to associate matches with ECMWF fields will need to work on ERA Interim data at 1.5 deg resolution (currently available) in the first instance, and therefore will need to be coded flexibly to deal with ECMWF data of higher resolution later. GC is going to Germany to work through the MMD coding plan with Norman Fomerra and the Brockmann Consult team next week. CM and GC agreed that, for the passive microwave sensors, we would simply use the L2P version throughout, since we need to know the L2P product confidence flags for comparison with the new product confidence algorithm that will be developed within the project.

Regarding data set collection, the sourcing of AVHRR GAC is yet unresolved. Supply from CLASS via Ken Casey would take >10 months. The CLASS archive are unable to ship it directly on tape because of resource limitations at their end. The ECMWF copy requires special access, and GC will arrange a speed test to UoL.

The question of why the SCOPE-CM BTs are significantly different than expected is also pending. But it does seem that the initial estimates of the availability of SCOPE-CM data were too optimistic.

Decisions:
MF will establish what GAC CLASS could provide by end Jan 2011, raising possibility of disk instead of tape.
MF will start downloading 2010 GAC data from CLASS web ordering and ftp for NOAA-15,16,17,18,19 and Metop-2, which alone is estimated to require 2 months.
GC will arrange a speed test for downloading GAC from ECMWF to UoL.
MF will document SCOPE-GAC comparisons further.

DONM: Telecon with GC at Brockmann Consult Friday 26th Nov at 10 UTC.