1 Peter Regner (ESA) Paula S. Bontempi (NASA) Prakash Chauhan (ISRO) Contributions from IOCCG Ocean Color Radiometry – Virtual Constellation CEOS Plenary | Lucca, Italy | November 2011 new facts and activities since SIT

IOCCG Standing WG on Ocean Colour Essential Climate Variable (ECV) Assessment Mission statement: undertake a critical comparison of available OCR ECV products & provide guidance on the generation of better, long-term and coherent time series of global OCR climate data records Terms of Reference for the WG drafted at the IOCCG Executive meeting in Sep2011; to be finalized/approved at the next Executive meeting in Feb2012 IOCCG Executive to propose a WG Chair (not a space agency representative); will become an IOCCG member & report on progress of WG activities at annual IOCCG Committee meetings WG Chair to propose 6-8 WG members (drawn from a variety of institutions and disciplines); to be approved by the IOCCG Executive before appointment WG Chair to define annual work program incl. milestones and deliverables for completion of the first ECV assessment (2 year time frame) 1 st WG meeting will take place in 2012, possibly at the Joint Research Centre in Italy The IOCCG will fund one meeting of the WG every other year

INSITU-OCR: Concerted inter-agency/international effort on activities relating to sensor inter- comparison & uncertainty assessment of datasets required for ECV generation Co-leads appointed by the IOCCG to move forward with the “White Paper” – Dr. Giuseppe Zibordi (JRC) and Sean Bailey (NASA GSFC) Draft outline of white paper in development, delivered in November st meeting of writing team (8-10 members from CEOS space agencies) Feb 2012 in Washington, D.C. USA; 2 nd meeting at JRC in Italy (spring 2012) – self-funded 1 st draft of white paper in April 2012 (in time for the NASA OCRT meeting) final White Paper (15-20 pages) will form the basis document for activities to be undertaken by the INSITU-OCR, making use of existing programs: – i) calibration strategy – ii) in-situ data, protocols and validation – iii) algorithm development – iv) product inter-comparison, data merging NASA’s Field Support Program Office for existing and future (PACE) missions (recently established for 5 years) could act as the INSITU-OCR office to coordinate the various activities Outline and Writing Assignments for the INSITU-OCR "White Paper"

Preparations for IOCCG Community Consultation Meetings The IOCCG will hold a series of “International Ocean Color Community Consultation Meetings” starting from Rationale: Providing a fully open forum for discussions on various topics Helping IOCCG in its oversight role Building / reinforcing the international OC scientific community Enrolling more people into community work than is feasible through IOCCG meetings and WGs only Producing synthesis documents of interest for the community in question Reinforcing the community voice when it comes to high-level agency discussions First steps towards an international ocean color meeting in 2013: IOCCG to hold two half day sessions to obtain feedback from ocean color community on objectives, content and organization of such an international meeting Focus on Apr2012 NASA OCRT (US) & ESA MERIS/AATSR workshop Oct2012 (ESRIN) Look towards the 2013 “IOCRT” (name TBD) Open questions: IOCCG sponsorship, frequency (yearly, bi-yearly?), …

CEOS MIM –Assessment of appropriate parameter/instrument lists and utility levels (i.e., High/General/Potential/Marginal) –Cooperation with international science community (IOCCG) –Phytoplankton Chlorophyll a, CDOM, and “ocean imagery” –Water-leaving radiance?