The annual meeting of the international Steering Committee (SC) for NDACC was held at the Belgium Science Policy Office in Brussels. Agenda items included a detailed report from the NDACC Data Host Facility on data archiving status and data utilization. This was followed by reports from the various Working Group (WG) Representatives on the SC (Dobson and Brewer, FTIR, Lidar, Microwave, Sondes, Spectral UV, UV/Visible, Satellites, Theory and Analysis, and Water Vapor).
These reports highlighted WG activities and/or meetings during the past year, summarized NDACC measurement and analysis activities not identified in the agenda for separate presentation, described proposals (pending and received) seeking NDACC affiliation, and outlined possible new sites for consideration. Subsequent reports from representatives of the NDACC Cooperating Networks (AERONET / MPLNET, AGAGE, BSRN, GRUAN, NOAA HATS, SHADOZ, and TCCON) focused on new Coordinating Network activities and initiatives pertinent to NDACC interests and to possible future collaborations.
A number of miscellaneous business discussions followed covering such items as NDACC involvement in various international projects, improved NDACC communications, future strategies and implementation, and the scheduling of future SC meetings. The venue for the 2015 SC meeting will be at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (La Jolla, CA, USA), a research site for the AGAGE Cooperating Network.
Following the close of the 2014 NDACC SC meeting, most SC members attended the following 2.5 days of the NORS/NDACC/GAW Workshop. The principal objective of the NORS project is to improve the quality and validation of the products delivered by the Copernicus Atmospheric Service (CAS), using independent ground-based remote sensing data from NDACC. NORS focused on a selection of NDACC data that have high priority in the different domains of CAS, namely ’ozone and UV’, ‘air quality’ and ‘climate’. The research planned in NORS aims at tailoring these NDACC products to the needs of CAS. It includes a full characterization of the products and an evaluation of the consistency between the ground-based data and the satellite data assimilated in the CAS production chain.
The successes of both the NDACC SC Meeting and the NORS/NDACC/GAW Workshop were greatly facilitated by their coordinated scheduling and by the participation of many international scientists having common interests in both NDACC and the NORS Project.