Earth Observing Missions and Sensors: Development, Implementation, and Characterization II

Many earth-observing missions, with sensors covering spectral regions from ultraviolet to infrared, have been developed and utilized for studies of changes in the Earth's land, oceans, atmosphere, and their interactions. These missions include the U.S. NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) missions, National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Preparatory Project (NPP) mission, NOAA's Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) series, JAXA's Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) and Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS), the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellite series, the South Korean Communication, Ocean and Meteorological Satellite (COMS), and China's FY-1 and -2 satellite series. Successful operations and applications of these missions have significantly contributed to recent progress of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), which is being built as a public infrastructure interconnecting a diverse and growing array of instruments and systems for monitoring and forecasting changes in the global environment. Meanwhile, with technology advancements and design improvements, various new missions are currently underway throughout the world, such as the U.S. Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) missions, the next generation of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series (GOES-R), and the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), ESA's MetOp, Sentinel, and Earth Explorer missions, JAXA's Global Change Observation Mission (GCOM), ALOS-2, the joint ESA/JAXA EarthCARE mission, the joint NASA/JAXA GPM mission, and the next generation of China's FY satellite series. In addition to these research and operational missions, many efforts and advances have been made for the development of commercial and low-cost small satellites. As more and more satellite observations and data products are made available to the science and user community, high quality calibration and characterization of individual sensors and accurate determination of their calibration consistency have become increasingly important and demanding. Recent establishment of CEOS reference standard test sites, development of a Quality Assurance Framework for Earth Observation (QA4EO) and GSICS are such examples.

It is the purpose of this conference to provide an international forum to exchange information and promote discussion over a broad range of challenging topics concerning earth-observing mission development, technology implementation, new test equipment design, sensor calibration and characterization, performance verification, and data analysis techniques focusing on but not limited to wavelength regions from the ultraviolet through near-infrared.

Papers are solicited on the following and related topics pertaining to radiometer and imager systems:

• Existing missions and sensors, including their status, performance assessment, and lessons learned
• New research, operational, and commercial missions and sensors, including their mission studies, design requirements, applications, and system implementation
• Enabling technologies for sensor development and innovative techniques for sensor radiometric, spectral, spatial, and polarization calibration and characterization
• New sensor test concept and test equipment design
• Improved test data analysis methodologies and techniques
• Pre-launch and on-board calibration and characterization methodologies and results
• Calibration inter-comparison and consistency among sensors
• Sensor calibration accuracy and traceability
• Characterization and applications of CEOS recommended reference standard test sites
• Sensor performance validation and vicarious calibration.