UCAR's COSMIC Program Office invites you to attend the Sixth FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC Data Users Workshop, to be held at UCAR's Center Green (CG1) conference facility in Boulder, Colorado, USA from 30 October to 1 November 2012.
From the workshop organizing committee's Dear Colleague letter:
The FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC is a joint U.S.-Taiwan mission, launched in April 2006. Since its launch, FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC has provided more than three million GPS radio occultation (RO) soundings to support research and operation. As of March 2012, more than 1,800 researchers from 63 countries have become registered users of the data. Currently, FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC is providing between 1,000-1,500 GPS RO soundings per day. At a recent meeting in January 2012, U.S. and Taiwan sponsors of the mission decided to support the continued operation of the mission for another four years. The success of COSMIC has also prompted U.S. agencies to move forward with a follow-on RO mission (called FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2) with Taiwan that will launch six satellites into low-inclination orbits in early 2016, and another six satellites into high-inclination orbits in early 2018. The continued operation of FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC and the execution of the FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 mission promise to provide continuous high-quality GPS RO data at unprecedented density, which could greatly benefit research and operations.
The series of FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC Data Users Workshops have been an excellent forum for a dialogue between RO data providers and data users, and with which to promote and broaden the applications of RO data in various science disciplines, including weather, climate, and space weather. A highlight of this workshop will be the development of the FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 mission, and the opportunities it will provide for the weather, climate, and space weather communities with its unprecedented RO data.
More information about the workshop can be found at:
http://www.cosmic.ucar.edu/oct2012workshop/index.html
Registration information will be available at the above URL by 1 April 2012.
We encourage you to give a presentation to discuss your experience with and plans for using the data from FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC. If you wish to give a presentation at the workshop, please submit a title and short abstract at the above website once the registration page is available online on 1 April 2012. This workshop promises to be another interesting and stimulating meeting for us all. We hope you will attend and will also encourage your colleagues to join us.
We plan to host a Student Poster Competition again this year and some financial support may be available to U.S. student participants. More information will be provided by 1 April 2012.
We look forward to meeting you in Boulder in October 2012.
Sincerely,
Shu-peng Ben Ho
Chair, Workshop Organizing Committee
UCAR / COSMIC Project
3300 Mitchell Lane
Boulder, CO 80301
