News from the BIPM laboratories—2021

In order to fulfil its mission to ensure and promote the global comparability of measurements, the BIPM operates laboratories in the fields of physical metrology, time, ionizing radiation and chemistry. These laboratories act as centres for scientific and technical collaboration between Member States providing capabilities for international measurement comparisons on a shared cost basis. They coordinate international comparisons of national measurement standards agreed to be of the highest priority, and they establish and maintain appropriate reference standards for use as the basis of key international comparisons at the highest level and provide selected calibrations from them.

Laying Down the Groundwork for an International Measurement Infrastructure

The COVID-19 epidemic has brought to light the significant problems in the long-term care (LTC) sector, specifically the lack of an infrastructure to collect and aggregate data between LTC sectors in different countries. This talk will briefly describe goals of the WE-THRIVE initiative, and focus on exploring the development of “workforce and staffing” common data elements for LTC. We will describe how the subgroup is “laying down the groundwork” within this domain with various methodologies to develop CDEs related to workforce and staffing. The CDEs aim to measure staff retention and turnover, evaluating nursing supervisor effectiveness, and staff training in LTC. Anticipated challenges of this international work will also be highlighted. International research on LTC can valuably inform LTC policy and practice, and the proposed CDEs can facilitate data sharing and aggregation internationally, including low-, middle-, and high-income countries.

The Statistical Power and Confidence of Some Key Comparison Analysis Methods to Correctly Identify Participant Bias

The validity of calibration and measurement capability (CMC) claims by national metrology institutes is supported by the results of international measurement comparisons. Many methods of comparison analysis are described in the literature and some have been recommended by CIPM Consultative Committees. However, the power of various methods to correctly identify biased results is not well understood. In this work, the statistical power and confidence of some methods of interest to the CIPM Consultative Committees were assessed using synthetic data sets with known properties. Our results show that the common mean model with largest consistent subset delivers the highest statistical power under conditions likely to prevail in mature technical fields, where most participants are in agreement and CMC claims can reasonably be supported by the results of the comparison. Our approach to testing methods is easily applicable to other comparison scenarios or analysis methods and will help the metrology community to choose appropriate analysis methods for comparisons in mature technical fields.

Estimation of the tropospheric and stratospheric CO2 content by ground-based IR technique

<p>Ground-based spectroscopic international measurement systems TCCON and NDACC are important for regular obtaining the data on atmospheric gas composition. A great part of such data is derived as the total content of the gases and as an averaged mixing ratio for the dry atmosphere as, for example, XCO<sub>2</sub>. On the other hand, the measurements of solar IR radiation spectra with high spectral resolution carry within them some amount of information on the vertical structure of the content of some gases. The method of estimation of CO<sub>2</sub> content in the troposphere and stratosphere was described in a study [Timofeyev Yu.M., Nerobelov G.M., Poberovskii A.V., Filippov N.N. Evaluation of CO<sub>2</sub> content in troposphere and stratosphere by ground-based IR method.  “Izvestiya, Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics”. 2021, Nо.2]. In our work we present the analysis of the inaccuracies of the suggested approach using different spectral windows. Also, we demonstrate the comparison between CO<sub>2</sub> tropospheric and stratospheric content obtained by the suggested approach using ground-based measurements of IR spectra with high resolution in Peterhof (2009-2019), by Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and by satellite measurements of XCO<sub>2</sub> in the troposphere and stratosphere using ACE instrument.</p>

Introductory notes for the Acta IMEKO special section on the IMEKO TC17 co-sponsored international conference ISMCR’2019

The ELROB'2018 competition brought together teams focusing on applications related to civilian security missions, the detection of improvised explosive devices (terrorist threat) and the evacuation of victims, scenarios favoured by Defence experts gathered in research groups of the Organization 'Science and Technology' of NATO. The aim of these competitions is to promote the best advances in technology and to strengthen cooperation in research. The ELROB event has been doubled this year by the organization of the 21^st International Symposium on Robotics (ISMCR’2018) under the auspices of the International Measurement Confederation IMEKO, and more particularly its technical committee (TC17) coordinator of research in robotics, chaired by Japan, of which Belgium is an active member in charge of the organization of this symposium. Here, we provide the readers around the world the opportunity to access the recent advancements in robotics, mobile robotics in particular, especially in dynamic conditions.

Outreach in the era of big data with the Pierre Auger Observatory

The Pierre Auger Observatory, built to study the physics of astroparticles, has expanded its endeavours in outreach and education. Since its inception, the collaboration has been informing the general public about its discoveries. From creating a visitor center in Malargüe, Argentina, to providing talks for different audiences, science fairs for students, international measurement workshops, and making compilations of the scientific contributions of women in different countries throughout history, we share the passion for science with the population. The collaboration processes a huge amount of data and requires a large storage capacity. However, 10% of this data is made available to the general public in a useable format. The collaboration developed special masterclasses aimed at high school students, providing the software that can be used to analyse the public data set. In addition, a summary of the different outreach activities performed by the members of the Pierre Auger Collaboration will be presented.