1. MIRS Science and other Updates S.-A. Boukabara and K. Garrett

2. Output Format We want to minimize as much as possible the format changes. Even if they occur, it will be seamless (as the library we provide to read the data reflects the changes) Please suggest all parameters you need to see in output files, so we can add them. The following are being added: –Corrected TBs –Solar zenith angle –Relative azimuth angle –Version number of algorithm that generated file.

3. Publications MIRS Presentations for the upcoming MicroRad: –“The retrievals of sea-ice concentration from variationally-retrieved microwave surface emissivities”. Kongoli, Boukabara, Yan, Weng and Ferraro –“The retrievals of effective grain size and snow water equivalent from variationally-retrieved microwave surface emissivities”. Kongoli, Boukabara and Weng –“Theoretical study of the impact of scanning geometry on microwave sounding of temperature and humidity.” Boukabara, Garrett and Weng –“NOAA-08: An Optimal Atmospheric Dataset for Algorithm Training and Covariance Matrix Generation.”. Garrett, Boukabara and Weng The goal is to have these presentations turned into 4 papers submitted to the special issue of MicroRad08 or another journal by March 08.

4. MIRS Release to Scientific Community Got approval so far from : –STAR Security Coordinator, –Funding agency (OSD, Tom Schott, NDE Jim Silva) –Al Powel (pending licensing agreement in place) All we need is a licensing agreement (we have an almost complete draft based on ECMWF and NWS agreements). Will shortly circulate it for approval. We have everything in place technically to release the package (password protection, online download system, etc)

5. MIRS Interface with NDE We had a follow-up technical meeting with NDE at NSOF to describe technical details of MIRS Interface/Integration within NDE system. Several changes are likely necessary in our technical implementation and output formats Main change is likely to be: –Passing output files in PCF (instead of constructing them in script. They would need to be done by GUI). –Extending version numbers inside all data and src files (as we might be passing individual patches in case of emergency fixes) –Transferring several items in the PCF into the Tuning file, to shield them from being registered as possible modifiable options.

6. Validation System (sounding) Our validation results presented by Kevin at the last meeting were confirmed independently, by Tony Reale and Bomin Sun. So our baseline performances are fine. Plan is to extension MIRS daily validation: –Comparison to COSMIC Data (refractivity). We have access to these data through DDS (credit to Cathy Nicols). Need to work on a reader (on going contact with Lidia and Thomas) –Comparison to ECMWF data. Issue with accessing data. Contact in progress with Walter Wolf and Mitch Goldberg to revise the ECMWF agreement if needed. We are entering a different phase in the validation stage: checking profile by profile for (1) lapse rates, (2) supersaturation, etc. (even if statistically we are doing very good, we need to make sure every profile meets certain standards).

7. Impact of Relative Humidity and loosening constraint on First Guess (Land/Temp) This is based on comparisons with ICDB datasets

8. Impact of Relative Humidity and loosening constraint on First Guess (Land / WV) Setting the RH maximum value to 100 reduces the stdeviation This is based on comparisons with ICDB datasets

9. Impact of Relative Humidity and loosening constraint on First Guess (Ocean/Temp) This is based on comparisons with ICDB datasets

10. Impact of Relative Humidity and loosening constraint on First Guess (Ocean/WV) This is based on comparisons with ICDB datasets Setting the RH maximum value to 100 reduces the stdeviation

11. What’s next We will update the OSDPD with a flag change (extUseQ) and the max RH (100 instead of 120%). This helps a number of individual profiles and improve slightly the WV stats. This also helped the overall retrieval fields by removing the stripes due to angle stratification of the first guess. Re-training of the first guess based on GDAS (many super-saturated profiles found in GDAS fields used for training). We might update the regression coeffs files to OSDPD if this turns to improve the results. We did mostly 90-95% of the work to reach good performances of T and Q. The remaining 5-10% are going to be ‘step by step’ improvements.