Second GALION Workshop September 2010, Geneva, Switzerland Data assimilation (ICAP) Gelsomina Pappalardo 1, Judd Welton 2 1 Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche-Istituto di Metodologie per l’Analisi Ambientale CNR-IMAA, Potenza, Italy 2 NASA-GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, USA

Second GALION Workshop September 2010, Geneva, Switzerland ICAP is an international forum for aerosol forecast centers, remote sensing data providers, and lead systems developers to share best practices and discuss pressing issues facing the operational aerosol community. While the dynamical meteorology community has a well developed protocols and near real-time observing systems to support forecasting, the aerosol community is only beginning to organize. Infrastructure and data protocols need to be developed between operational centers in order to fully support this emerging field. International Cooperative for Aerosol Prediction (ICAP/AEROCAST) Workshops - Aerosol Observability: April, 2010 Monterey CA - Model Verification: September, 2010 Oxford England (Joint with 9th AEROCOM Workshop)

Second GALION Workshop September 2010, Geneva, Switzerland Aerosol Observability: April, 2010 Monterey CA While the last 3 years has seen rapid operational implementation of aerosol and pollution models around the world, the key to the further development of these models is aerosol observing data from satellites and ground stations for model evaluation and data assimilation. This first organizational meeting of ICAP centered on present and future remote sensing observing systems to support aerosol prediction. Participants included ECMWF, ESA, EUMETSAT, FNMOC, GMAO, JAXA, JMA, NCEP, NESDIS, NRL, NASA GSFC, LANCE, and NASA LarC as well as several universities. Presentations, including a final summary, can be found at For more info please contact Jeff Reid (NRL)

Second GALION Workshop September 2010, Geneva, Switzerland LIDAR data sources need to be relatively continuous. CALIPSO/CALIOP: Recent expedited processing <25 hours has allowed for much larger user base. A new assimilation friendly product under development will be tested and perhaps implemented in operational/quasi-operational sweep runs. EarthCARE ATLID: Hopefully will have NRT production. With current collaboration with CALIPSO team, operational centers will likely be ready to assimilate data by launch if available. Lidar networks (AD-NET, MPLNET, Earlinet, GALION): Very useful for validation, but there are difficulties for operational use. The exception is the Asian AD-Net which has sufficient density and consistent data formats for regional assimilation. Lidar data shopping list: Aerosol backscattering, extinction, depolarization, feature mask/target classification, cloud products (synergistic with cloud radar, should be formulated by the cloud assimilation community).

Second GALION Workshop September 2010, Geneva, Switzerland Model Verification: September, 2010 Oxford England Operational forecast centers have long standing metrics designed to evaluate model performance (e.g., the 500 hPa anomaly). The aerosol forecasting community has yet to agree on applicable metrics and protocols in this regard. In this second ICAP meeting, centers and developers will discuss model metric methods and suitable verification datasets. Establishing common metrics to evaluate model performance is a powerful tool to assess progress in aerosol forecasting capabilities both for individual centers and for the community as a whole.

Second GALION Workshop September 2010, Geneva, Switzerland GALION is expected to provide a feedback to ICAP The main ICAP question is: is it possible to put together a customer-designed product from the GALION network that can suit the NRT requirements for verification? For example following what has been established with CALIPSO: Level 1.5 data (same products as Level 2, but not quality assured) The CALIPSO team is preparing a level 1.5 product based on their feature level 2 product and backscattering level 1 that is geared toward use by the operational centres. The task for GALION is bigger because there are many more data providers, but it could be a starting point.

Second GALION Workshop September 2010, Geneva, Switzerland ICAP2, September, 2010 Oxford England preliminary agenda