Joint Aerosol-Monsoon Experiment--A New Challenge for Monsoon Climate Reseach by K.-M. Lau, et al., was published in the March 2008 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

The article describes the scientific rationale and the challenges of studying aerosol-monsoon water cycle interaction and outlines a proposal for a 5-year joint aerosol-monsoon experiment (JAMEX) based on recommendations made at the international workshop "Effects of Elevated Aerosols on the Radiation and Dynamics of the Monsoon Water Cycle" which was co-sponsored by the GEWEX Coordinated Energy and Water Cycle Observations Project (CEOP) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China in August 2006.

ISCCP Celebrates 25th Anniversary. On 1 July 2008, the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP), the first project of the World Climate Research Programme, will mark its 25th Anniversary. Not bad for a 5-yr project!

The original concept for ISCCP was to collect and distribute enough global satellite data to facilitate research on the role of clouds in climate, specifically their effects on the radiation budget and their role in the atmospheric water cycle. These data were to be sampled at sufficiently fine space-time intervals to capture the mesoscale-to-global scale and diurnal to interannual variations of cloud physical properties. In addition to calibrating, navigating, quality checking and distributing the satellite radiance data for the whole research community to use (one of the earliest projects to invest in more "user-friendly" Level 1 data), ISCCP conducted a comparison of the then existing cloud algorithms and participated in comparisons of radiative model representations of clouds – work that is ongoing today.

Based on these results, a new algorithm was designed, borrowing ideas from all the existing algorithms, and the radiance data processed to provide several different cloud data products that could be used for the research mentioned above. As more pointed questions have been asked involving clouds, the ISCCP product line has continued to expand, now including radiative flux profiles, cloud particle sizes and several subsets concerning specific cloud system types (convective tracking, cyclone tracking, pattern recognition analysis for tropics and midlatitudes).

The ISCCP products have now developed into one of the longest time records of global cloud variations and have become part of the Global Climate Observing System. Approval of continuing funding now makes it possible to switch the analysis from the 30 km sampled radiances to the 10 km sampled radiances, which will provide results at nearly the full (IR) resolution and make the products statistically more robust for cloud process studies.

ISCCP was not originally designed as a "climate data record", but with the record length growing there is more interest in that use. There are a number of features that make the current products less useful for that purpose; but approval has been obtained to re-engineer the ISCCP processing system to attempt to improve the quality enough to form a cloud Climate Data Record.

EGU Alfred Wegener Medal Award to Pierre Morel for his outstanding contributions to geophysical fluid dynamics and his leadership in the development of climate research and the applications of space observation to meteorology and the Earth system science.

Landsat Imagery for Everyone: The USGS Landsat archive is an unequaled 35-year record of the Earth’s surface that is valuable for a broad range of uses, ranging from climate change science to forest management to emergency response, plus countless other user applications. Under a transition toward a National Land Imaging Program sponsored by the Secretary of the Interior, the USGS is pursuing an aggressive schedule to provide users with electronic access to any Landsat scene held in the USGS-managed national archive of global scenes dating back to Landsat 1, launched in 1972. By February 2009, any Landsat archive scene selected by a user will be processed, at no charge, automatically to a standard product recipe and staged for electronic retrieval. In addition, newly acquired scenes meeting a cloud cover threshold of 20% or below will be processed to the standard recipe and placed on line for at least 3 months, after which they will remain available for selection from the archive. For details see http://landsat.usgs.gov.

Third GEWEX Atmospheric Boundary Layer Study (GABLS) Intercomparison Case Planned. This case will allow models to interact with the surface instead of a prescribed surface temperature, and will use simple but realistic stable boundary conditions to enable a quantitative evaluation of the models with observations. Data from Cabauw, The Netherlands, will be used in the study, which will focus on the model representation of the decoupling at sunset, the development of the inertial oscillation, and the morning time transition to convective conditions. If you are interested in participating, contact Fred Bosveld at fred.bosveld@knmi.nl. The deadline for sending in model results is 1 May 2008. Model results sent in before this date will be included in a preliminary intercomparison that will be presented at the American Meteorological Society 18th Symposium on Boundary Layer and Turbulence, 9–13 June 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden. In addition, an intercomparison of Large Eddy Simulation Models and an evaluation with the Cabauw data is currently in preparation. Contact Sukanta Basu (sukanta.basu@ttu.edu) for more information. See http://www.knmi.nl/samenw/gabls for details of the case.

Books Published with GEWEX Results.

The Mackenzie GEWEX Study (MAGS) concluded in December 2005 after over a decade of atmospheric and hydrologic research on the Mackenzie River Basin in Canada. Over 100 co-authors contributed to the 2-volume book, Cold Region Atmospheric and Hydrologic Studies: The Mackenzie GEWEX Experience, (published by Springer) which provides the scientific accomplishments of the MAGS Project. For more information about MAGS and its data sets see http://www.usask.ca/geography/MAGS/lo_Data_e.htm.

Assessment of Climate Change for the Baltic Sea Basin (BACC) published by Springer offers an up-to-date overview of the latest scientific findings in regional climate research on the Baltic Sea Basin, including climate changes in the recent past, climate projections up until 2100 using regional climate models, and an assessment of climate change impacts on terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems. One of the key findings presented in the book is that air temperatures in the Baltic Sea basin could rise up to 5 degrees Celsius between now and 2100. BACC is a project within the Baltic Sea Experiment (BALTEX), a GEWEX Regional Hydroclimate Project.

Prof. Guoxiong Wu Elected as New IAMAS President. GEWEX congratulates Professor Wu, Laboratory of Numerical Modelling of Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, on his election as the President of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (IAMAS). Prof. Wu has been an active member of the GEWEX community, serving as a member of the GEWEX Scientific Steering Group from 2001-2005. He is now serving as an officer of the Joint Scientific Committee for the World Climate Research Programme.