VOCALS Field Catalog Twiki

General Guidelines

This TWiki site is intended as a single location to organize comments and suggestions from the VOCALS community regarding the Field Catalog that will be set up by the VOCALS Project Office at EOL for the VOCALS Regional Experiment (VOCALS-REx). Eventually, it is intended that this developing site will serve as a useful introduction to the VOCALS-REx FIeld Catalog for users in the field. The TWiki is broken down into different sections corresponding to the different aspects of the Catalog. Wherever possible, commentors/authors should include their name in square parentheses after specific comments, and the date that a comment is made. This will help facilitate planning. Suggestions should use fixed font which should be written between two equal signs, i.e. This is a suggestion. As these suggestions are responded to and reflected in changes in the Field Catalog the intention is to replace them with appropriate text.

Location and Organization of the Field Catalog

The VOCALS Field Catalog will be developed during 2008. The Field Catalog for the 2007 Stratus Cruise is being used as a dry run. The cruise runs from October 14th-November 6th 2007.

The subsections of the Field Catalog that will be continued through to VOCALS are:

• Catalog Homepage
• Daily Reports
• Operational Products
• Model Products
• Research Products
• Tools and Links

The following sections will describe each of these subsections individually

Catalog Homepage

This overview page contains links to the other catalog subsections. It is therefore the first point of entry to the Field Catalog and so it is important that this page contains information useful to field planning. Currently, it shows the latest GOES Ch4 thermal infrared image.

Make image twice the size and constrain the domain to the VOCALS region (40S-0S, 110W,60W),  [Rob Wood, October 15 2007]

Quicklinks from the homepage need to be thought out.

Daily Reports

The Daily Reports section of the Field Catalog contains reports detailing activities of the various platforms. It is hoped that all participating platforms will produce a report (e.g. a flight report, or daily description of ship activities) during VOCALS-REx. After each C-130 mission, the flight scientist will complete a flight report. Examples of these can be found on the DYCOMS Field Catalog

Operational Products

Operational Products include all operationally-produced observational data that will help field planning. For example, satellite data, surface and upper air observations, buoy observations, will all be included within this subsection.

Satellite Products

GOES

The current scale of the GOES IR (Channel 4) imagery needs to be stretched to give more contrast between the surface and the low clouds. We don't particularly care in VOCALS about clouds colder than about 270 K. As long as it is possible to tell the difference between a low cloud and a high cloud it will be fine. Can these images be put into temperature units so that the cloud top temperature can be read off the figure directly? [Rob Wood, October 15th 2007]

The scale has been stretched and converted to temperature to highlight low clouds [Greg Stossmeister, October 22 2007]

=The IR scale only appears to show three shades of gray for the low cloud temperature range. Is this the limit of the digitization of the GOES data? [Rob Wood, October 27 2007]

The field catalog by default loops the last 5-hours worth of images. The items that will be part of an image loop are signified by red dots under the hour in the table header row. Gray dots mean the images in this column will not be included in an image loop. Click on the dots to toggle on(red) or off(gray). [Greg Stossmeister, October 22 2007]

For the Ch1 imagery, besides high resolution imagery centered on the ship, we will require lower resolution imagery extending over the entire VOCALS region that can be resonably sampled with the ship (90W-60W,30S-10S) [Rob Wood, October 15th 2007] Channel 1 images are now being produced, at full resolution, for an approximate domain of: 14-26.5S, 68-85.5W. These images are huge (1800x1400) and thus are not being ingested into the field catalog.

The key forecasting product for spotting POCs and their likely location of formation is the Ch4-Ch2 brightness temperature different (BTD) during nighttime. It would be extremely useful to have this imagery available This product is in process.[Greg Stossmeister, October 22 2007]

Passive Microwave Imagery

MODIS Terra and Aqua

CloudSat? and CALIPSO

Model Products

Model Products include forecasting and special reanalysis products produced in real time for VOCALS-REx.

NRL COAMPS Forecast Products

Contact Person: Shouping Wang [NRL]

NCEP GFS Forecast Products

Contact Person: Hua-Lu Pan [NCEP]/Roberto Mechoso [UCLA]

Univ Chile Forecast Products

Contact Person: Rene Garreaud [U de Chile]

Met Office NAME Forecasts

Contact Person: Steve Abel [The Met Office]

FLEXPART Model Forecasts

Contact Person: Jerome Brioude [NOAA ESRL]

FLEXPART Model Products for VOCALS

Research Products

Research Products include products produced from instrumentation deployed in the field during VOCALS-REx.

Tools and Links

Tools and Links contains tools for report writing, links to upload reports to the Field Catalog, the Catalog User Guide, information about the Chat Room, and links to other useful complementary data that may be useful in the field.

-- RobWood - 15 Oct 2007