Research Highlight:
Upcoming GRUAN Meetings
Two upcoming meetings, to be held at the Richard Assmann Observatory in Lindenberg, Germany, aim to initiate the GCOS (Global Climate Observing System) Reference Upper Air Network (GRUAN). The first meeting, February 25, 2008, will be the first face-to-face meeting of the GCOS Working Group on Atmospheric Reference Observations. This Working Group reports to the GCOS Atmospheric Observing Panel on Climate and is charged with facilitating the establishment of the GRUAN and liaising with other organizations. The second meeting, February 26-28, will be the GRUAN Initiation Meeting and will involve a larger group of scientists, site operators, managers, and representatives of international and national organizations who will seek agreement on key issues involving the initiation of the observational network.
NOAA participants include: Dian Seidel (OAR/ARL), Howard Diamond (NESDIS/NCDC), Bill Murray (OAR/CPO), Matt Menne (NESDIS/NCDC), Mitch Goldberg (NESDIS/STAR), Ellsworth Dutton (OAR/ESRL), and Holger Vomel (University of Colorado/CIRES and OAR/ESRL).
The GRUAN has been identified as a high priority in the GCOS Implementation Plan. NOAA and GCOS have provided leadership for the GRUAN effort by organizing workshops to define requirements for the GRUAN (Boulder, February 2005) and to identify potential instrumentation, station locations, and network and data management needs (Seattle, May 2006). A GCOS report provides results of these workshops.
The GRUAN will address long-recognized unmet needs in the global observing system by providing long-term, continuous, high-quality in situ atmospheric profile observations for climate monitoring, calibration of satellite observations and products, and climate process studies. The GRUAN is an important contribution to the Global Earth Observing System of Systems.