EARLINET-ASOS is organized in the following networking activities (NA):
Management will comprise the areas of communication with the Commission for all contractual and administrational matters, organization of annual and special reports, organization of consortium meetings, monitoring the progress of work based on milestones and deliverables, identification of problems and suggestions for ways to solve them.
Central to the achievement of the project objectives is a smooth information flow between all the participants allowing the sharing of their expertise. This will be implemented through a structure of workshops held every six months.
The main objective of this activity is to provide effective means to improve the EARLINET infrastructure through a comprehensive and organized flow of information both between the participants and between the participants and the external scientific and general community.
For internal communication the objective is to disseminate, in a timely way, the results of all other networking activities and the established working groups, in order to spread the knowledge, to discuss various approaches, to critically assess the progress, and to provide additional information for more effective use of the tools provided by other groups. A “transverse” flow of information will be promoted, so that all the participants can share their expertise on a peer-to-peer basis. Special attention will be given to the training of young scientists, from student to junior scientist level, in advanced observation methodology as well as in cooperative research.
For communication with the wider atmospheric science community the objective is to provide an interface with potential users of the EARLINET data such as atmospheric scientists and modellers, and meteorological and climate observation organizations, as well as with other entities providing similar or complementary data.
This will be implemented by defining standardized tools for internal quality checks at both instrument and inversion algorithm levels, by providing assistance to the participating stations to apply these tools to their instruments and procedures, and by compiling the different system and subsystems setups at individual stations.
The objective of this activity is to improve the instruments of the observation system by selecting the optimal instrumental approach from the various solutions existing at individual stations, for the components and subsystems as well as for system integration. Emphasis will be made on automation, for extended temporal coverage, and standardization, for improved interoperability in future networks.
The main objective of this activity is to provide all partners with the possibility to use a common single processing chain for the evaluation of their data, from raw signals to final products. Raw signals may come from different types of systems, final products are profiles of optical properties like backscatter and extinction and, as far as instrument properties permit, microphysical properties.
The aim is to build a common database that is automatically and continuously updated through a software system which automatically collects the data products provided by the individual stations and makes them available to the community; in addition to the continuously updated quality-controlled lidar data, the database will include auxiliary data allowing to search for data meeting specified criteria. It will be accessible through a web-based interface to provide easy access to data products for internal and external users.