Satellite Calibration/Validation and Related Activities Carried out through NASA/ESA Joint Program Planning Group Subgroup

Author(s):  
Jack Kaye ◽  
Malcolm Davidson

<p>The NASA/ESA Joint Program Planning Group (JPPG) subgroup on satellite calibration/validation was created to facilitate coordinated efforts between ESA, NASA, and their respective investigator communities to enhance calibration and/or validation activities for current and/or future satellite missions. The cooperation enabled through this activity includes airborne campaigns, use of surface-based measurements, and satellite-to-satellite intercomparisons. Numerous examples of such activities exist over the ten years of the JPPG. In this talk, examples of calibration/validation focused activities, accomplishments, and future plans will be presented. A particular focus will be on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected field work planned for 2020 and 2021.  The JPPG subgroup also includes joint European-US studies of satellite results that integrate the results of both parties’ observational capabilities, and the status of those activities will be presented as well.</p>

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Asep Priatna

This study aims to reveal the efforts and results that have been achieved by Lampang Subang Integrated Private Vocational Schools in improving the quality of learning to meet national education standards (SNP), so that they become private schools with the status of national standard schools (SSN). This research is a survey research with a quantitative approach. The study was conducted at the Integrated Vocational School of Lampang Subang, West Java. The results showed that the level of achievement of the program that had been compiled in the RPS of Lampang Integrated Vocational School had reached 90% with the main target being the achievement of the UAN level and graduation that had been carried out by teachers both in the preparation of RPPs and teaching materials had reached 85%, Management developed by Integrated Vocational Schools Long-time contributed significant value, especially in program planning and implementation, while the supervision and leadership of the Principal has been running well, so the value obtained is quite significant, while other components that are quite prominent are PBM and content standards that get good enough grades , so that it can be developed further


Author(s):  
G. M. Spooner

The work of which an account is here given was largely carried out from the autumn of 1937 to the spring of 1940, when it was interrupted by the war. In taking it up again (in July 1945) while, facilities for field work are still limited, the author feels it useful to publish results as they stand and indicate where further work is considered advisable.In examinations of the free-swimming bottom fauna of the Tamar and other estuaries, attention was inevitably drawn to the populations of Gammarus species, which make up the greater bulk of it. Before quantitative observations were planned, some interesting points came to light with regard to the qualitative composition of populations. This aspect lent itself more readily to study and, though byno means a new field for exploration, soon proved worth examining ingreater detail than previous workers had attempted.The broad fact of a replacement of one Gammarus species by another in passing up an estuary was well enough known, though exact knowledge for the British Isles only starts from the time when G. zaddachi Sexton was recognized as a regular member of the upper estuarine fauna of the Tay (Bassindale, 1933; Alexander, Southgate & Bassindale, 1935) and of the Deben (Serventy, 1935). This species proved to be the main brackish-water species overlapping with the marine G. locusta (L.) near the seaward end, and with the fresh-water G. pulex (L.) at the river end (or ‘head’) of the estuary. The status in estuaries of two other brackish-water species, G. duebeni Lillj. and G. chevreuxi Sexton, remained obscure.


Africa ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Carstens

Opening ParagraphAlthough the Khoikhoi or so-called Hottentots are still discussed in social anthropological literature, there is relatively little interest in them nowadays in comparison with the San (Bushmen) or various Bantu-speaking peoples. This lack of interest is really quite surprising since Radcliffe-Brown drew heavily on the Nama Khoikhoi material in his essay on the mother's brother in South Africa (Radcliffe-Brown 1924). Radcliffe-Brown, incidentally, based his knowledge of the Nama almost entirely on his interpretation of the field work of Mrs A. W. Hoernlé, using two unpublished papers and personal communication with Mrs Hoernlé as his sources. There is, however, a more important reason why the Khoikhoi are of interest. Many aspects of their way of life, ranging from the status of wives to religious beliefs and practices, are very ‘unAfrican’ if we equate African with Bantu-speaking Africa as is so often done.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Nüst ◽  
Frank Ostermann ◽  
Carlos Granell ◽  
Alexander Kmoch

In an attempt to increase the reproducibility of contributions to a long-running and established geospatial conference series, the 23rd AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science 2020 (https://agile-online.org/conference-2020) for the first time provided guidelines on preparing reproducible papers (Nüst et al., 2020) and appointed a reproducibility committee to evaluate computational workflows of accepted papers ( https://www.agile-giscience-series.net/review_process.html). Here, the committee’s members report on the lessons learned from reviewing 23 accepted full papers and outline future plans for the conference series. In summary, six submissions were partially reproduced by reproducibility reviewers, whose reports are published openly on OSF ( https://osf.io/6k5fh/). These papers are promoted with badges on the proceedings’ website (https://agile-giss.copernicus.org/articles/1/index.html). Compared to previous years’ submissions (cf. Nüst et al. 2018), the guidelines and increased community awareness markedly improved reproducibility. However, the reproduction attempts also revealed problems, most importantly insufficient documentation. This was partly mitigated by the non-blind reproducibility review, conducted after paper acceptance, where interaction between reviewers and authors can provide the input and attention needed to increase reproducibility. However, the reviews also showed that anonymisation and public repositories, when properly documented, can enable a successful reproduction without interaction, as was the case with one manuscript. Individual and organisational challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the conference’s eventual cancellation increased the teething problems. Nevertheless, also under normal circumstances, future iterations will have to reduce the reviewer’s efforts to be sustainable, ideally by more readily executable workflows and a larger reproducibility committee. Furthermore, we discuss changes to the reproducibility review process and their challenges. Reproducibility reports could be made available to “regular” reviewers, or the reports could be considered equally for acceptance/rejection decisions. Insufficient information or invalid arguments for not disclosing material could then lead to a submission being rejected or not being sent out to peer review. Further organisational improvements are a publication of reviewers’ activities in public databases, making the guidelines mandatory, and collecting data on used tools/repositories, spent efforts, and communications. Finally, we summarise the revision of the guidelines, including their new section for reproducibility reviewers, and the status of the initiative “Reproducible Publications at AGILE Conferences” (https://reproducible-agile.github.io/initiative/), which we connect to related undertakings such as CODECHECK (Eglen et al., 2019). The AGILE Conference’s experiences may help other communities to transition towards more open and reproducible research publications.


Acrocephalus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (172-173) ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Domen Stanič ◽  
Primož Kmecl ◽  
Jernej Figelj ◽  
Andrej Sovinc

AbstractIn this work we investigated the historical and present breeding range of the Ortolan Bunting in Slovenia and studied one of its last remaining breeding grounds in the country. Its range has suffered a marked decline in the last few decades, bringing the species on the brink of extinction in Slovenia. Firstly, we gathered all the available data and field records regarding the species in Slovenia and created several distribution maps outlining the status of the Ortolan Bunting in Slovenia. Thus we were able to confirm the drastic reduction in the species range, now confined to only two larger breeding grounds on the Karst (Kras). Field work was then concentrated on studying and monitoring one of the two last known populations of Ortolan Buntings in Slovenia. We paid special attention to the study of the males’ singing territories. Our main discovery was the presence of a lek in the central part of the study area, where several different male Ortolan Buntings shared their song-posts. In 2013 we counted a total of 18 Ortolan Buntings and found 5 nests, whereas in 2014 we counted 16 individuals, with 4 pairs probably breeding there. The number of breeding pairs is thus significantly lower than the total number of males holding territory. In the period from 2005 to 2016, the population of Ortolan Bunting in Slovenia was in steep decline.


Author(s):  
А.Г. Агабабян ◽  
М.Э. Сысоева

Статья посвящена детальному рассмотрению стратегий конструирования убыхской идентичности в медиапространстве. Проникнув во все сферы жизни общества, медиа не только успешно заместили традиционные способы общения, но и расширили коммуникативные возможности человека и способы его личного позиционирования. На этом фоне ощутимее звучит идея о стирании границ между онлайн и офлайн, что позволяет выстраивать максимально креативные поведенческие стратегии как на индивидуальном, так и на групповом уровнях. В более узком смысле эти стратегии затронули также проблему этнической репрезентации. Довольно актуальными они оказались и для убыхского сообщества, которому постоянно приписывают статус «вымершего» народа или окончательно утратившего собственный неповторимый язык. Анализ качественно новых нарративов демонстрирует, что дискурсы убыхского «вымирания» и «возрождения» гармонично сосуществуют в пределах виртуальности и регулярно актуализируются активистами ревитализационного движения. Наряду с более привычными (публикации в СМИ, документальные фильмы, телевизионные репортажи) популярность получают качественно иные инструменты мобилизации этничности — хэштеги, никнеймы, тематические «группы» в социальных сетях и т.д. Выявленные характеристики подтверждаются материалами экспедиции к потомкам убыхов в современной Турции (осень 2015 г.) и полевыми этнографическими исследованиями в Причерноморской Шапсугии и соседней Абхазии (лето-осень 2018 г.), посвященными изучению отдельных семейств, претендующих на убыхское происхождение. Описываемые тактики и стратегии очевидно дают понять, как на наших глазах разворачивается изобретение убыхской идентичности и насколько неустойчиво мнение об окончательной гибели сообщества. This article is devoted to detailed consideration of strategies for constructing Ubykh identity in the media space. Having got into all spheres of life of the society, media not only successfully replaced traditional ways of communication, but also expanded communicative opportunities of the person and ways of his personal identification. Against this background, there is a blurring of the boundaries between online and offline, which allows building the most creative behavioral strategies on both individual and group levels. In the narrow sense, these strategies also addressed the issue of ethnic representation. They were also relevant for the Ubykh community, which was constantly credited with the status of an «extinct» people or people who lost their own unique language. The analysis of qualitatively new narratives shows that the discourses of Ubykh’s «extinction» and «revival» coexist harmoniously within the limits of virtuality and are regularly actualised by the activists of the revitalization support. Along with the more familiar (publications in the media, documentaries, television reports) other tools for mobilizing ethnicity such as hashtags, nicknames, thematic «community» in social networks are also popular. The identified characteristics are confirmed by the materials of the expedition to the descendants of Ubykh in Turkey (autumn 2015), and field work in the Black Sea Shapsugia and neighboring Abkhazia (summer — autumn 2018) to study separate families, claiming their «Ubykh» descent. The described tactics and strategies help to understand how Ubykh identity is constructed, as well as to doubt the stability of the opinion about the final destruction of the community


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Cede ◽  
Martin Tiefengraber ◽  
Manuel Gebetsberger ◽  
Michel Van Roozendael ◽  
Henk Eskes ◽  
...  

<p>The worldwide operating Pandonia Global Network (PGN) is measuring atmospheric trace gases at high temporal resolution with the purpose of air quality monitoring and satellite validation. It is an activity carried out jointly by NASA and ESA as part of their “Joint Program Planning Group Subgroup” on calibration and validation and field activities, with additional collaboration from other institutions, most notably a strongly growing participation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The more than 50 official PGN instruments are homogeneously calibrated and their data are centrally processed in real-time. Since 2019, total NO2 column amounts from the PGN are uploaded daily to the ESA Atmospheric Validation Data Centre (EVDC), where they are used for operational validation of Sentinel 5P (S5P) retrievals. During 2020, a new processor version 1.8 has been developed, which produces improved total NO2 column amounts and also the following new PGN products: total columns of O3, SO2 and HCHO based on direct sun observations and tropospheric columns, surface concentrations and tropospheric profiles of NO2 and HCHO based on sky observations. In this presentation we show some first examples of comparisons of the new PGN products with S5P data. Compared to the total NO2 columns from the previous processor version 1.7, the 1.8 data use better estimations for the effective NO2 temperature and the air mass factor. The effect of this improvement on the comparison with S5P retrievals is shown for some remote and high-altitude PGN sites. The new PGN total O3 column algorithm also retrieves the effective O3 temperature, which is a rather unique feature for ground-based direct sun retrievals. This allows us to analyze whether potential differences to satellite O3 columns might be influenced by the O3 temperature. Including the O3 temperature in the spectral fitting has also allowed the retrieval of accurate total SO2 columns. This PGN data product is of particular interest for satellite validation, as ground-based total SO2 column amounts are hardly measured by other instrumentation. An initial comparison of the PGN SO2 columns with S5P retrievals at selected PGN sites around the world is shown. PGN total HCHO columns from direct sun measurements are now possible for those PGN instruments, where the hardware parts made of Delrin, which outgasses HCHO, have been replaced by Nylon pieces. An initial comparison to HCHO retrievals from S5P is shown for locations with these upgraded instruments. Another new feature in the 1.8 PGN data is that they come with comprehensive uncertainty estimations, separated in the output files as independent, structured, common and total uncertainty.</p>


2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-51
Author(s):  
Dragan Gruevski ◽  
Mirjana Cvetkovska

This research has an aim to determine the status of the school psychologists in the primary schools in Republic of Macedonia, confirmed through the explorations of the attitude of the teachers and other expert personnel regarding the school psychologist. For the need of this research, an instrument for measurement of the attitude toward the school psychologist (SSP) is constructed. The main conclusions drawn from the field work, statistical evaluations and analysis are that a large percent of the subjects (73%) have negative attitude toward the school psychologists and there is a lack of basic information regarding their status, role and tasks. These results are very significant because it is more than necessary to reveal and maybe to change some essential requirements about the working tasks, the demands, the duties and engagements of the school psychologists. Key words: instrument for measurement of the attitude, school psychologist, working atmosphere.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Boccia ◽  
Jennifer Adams ◽  
Kurtis J. Thome ◽  
Kevin R. Turpie ◽  
Raymond Kokaly ◽  
...  

<p>Imaging spectroscopy has been identified by ESA, NASA and other international space agencies as key to addressing a number of most important scientific and environmental management objectives. To implement the critical EU- and related policies for the management of natural resources, assets and benefits, and to achieve the objectives outlined by NASA’s Decadal Survey in ecosystem science, hydrology and geology, high fidelity imaging spectroscopy data with global coverage and high spatial resolution are required. As such, ESA’s CHIME (Copernicus Hyperspectral Imaging Mission for the Environment) and NASA’s SBG (Surface Biology and Geology) satellite missions aim to provide imaging spectroscopy data at global coverage at regular intervals of time with high spatial resolution.</p><p>However, the scientific and applied objectives motivate more spatial coverage and more rapid revisit than any one agency’s observing system can provide. With the development of SBG and CHIME, the mid-to-late 2020s will see more global coverage spectroscopic observing systems, whereby these challenging needs can be more fully met by a multi-mission and multi-Agency synergetic approach, rather than by any single observing system.</p><p>Therefore, an ESA-NASA cooperation on imaging spectroscopy space missions was seen as a priority for collaboration, specifically given the complementarity of mission objectives and measurement targets of the SBG and CHIME. Such cooperation is now being formalized as part of the ESA-NASA Joint Program Planning Group activities.</p><p>Among the others, calibration and validation activities (Cal/Val) are fundamental for imaging spectroscopy while the satellites are in-orbit and operating. They determine the quality and integrity of the data provided by the spectrometers and become even more crucial when data from different satellites, carrying different imaging sensors, are used by users worldwide in a complementary and synergetic manner, like it will be the case for CHIME and SBG data. Indeed, Cal/Val activities not only have enormous downstream impacts on the accuracy and reliability of the products, but also facilitate cross-calibration and interoperability among several imaging spectrometers, supporting their synergistic use. Accordingly, within the context of this cooperation, a Working Group (WG) on Calibration/Validation has been set up, aiming to establish a roadmap for future SBG-CHIME coordination activities and collaborative studies.</p><p>This contribution aims to outline the key areas of cooperation between SBG and CHIME in terms of Calibration and Validation, and present the establishment of a roadmap between the two missions, focusing on the following topics:</p><ul><li>Establishing an end-to-end cal/val strategy for seamless data products across missions, including transfer standards;</li> <li>Measurement Networks and commonly recognised Cal/Val reference sites;</li> <li>Status of atmospheric radiative transfer and atmospheric–correction procedures;</li> <li>Standardisation and Quality Control of reference data sets;</li> <li>Definition and implementation of joint airborne spectroscopy campaigns, such as the executed 2018 and planned 2021 campaigns, to simulate both missions and exercise the capabilities needed for eventual interoperability (incl. data collection, calibration, data product production);</li> <li>Continuous validation throughout the lifetime of products;</li> <li>Identifying other opportunities for efficiency and success through cooperation on calibration and validation, downlink capabilities and shared algorithms (e.g. compression and on-board data reduction).</li> </ul>


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document