GSICS Mission and Goals

Mission

Assure high-quality, inter-calibrated measurements from the international constellation of operational satellites to support the GEOSS goal of increasing the accuracy and interoperability of environmental products and applications for societal benefit.

Goals

The primary goal of GSICS is to improve the use of space-based global observations for weather, climate and environmental applications through operational inter-calibration of the space component of the WMO World Weather Watch (WWW) Global Observing System (GOS) and Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS). The basic GSICS strategies to achieve this goal are:

• To establish a GSICS Virtual Library to efficiently share information, software and data relevant to calibration;
• To build collaborations ensuring that each satellite instrument meets specifications by making pre-launch tests traceable to SI standards;
• To improve on-orbit calibration of satellite instrument observations by means of an integrated cal/val system, including instrument performance monitoring, inter-satellite/inter-sensor calibration, lunar and stellar calibration, vicarious calibration and validation with reference sites;
• To establish a distributed research component and a plan for research to operations transition;
• To build collaborations to retrospectively re-calibrate archive satellite data using the operational inter-calibration system in order to make satellite data archives worthy for NWP re-analysis and climate studies.