1. GPS & VLBI Meteorology over Northeast Brazil: Perspectives Alexandre A. Costa Alexandre A. Costa (*), A. M. P. de Lucena, P.Kaufmann, F. S. A. Cavalcante, F. G. M. Pinheiro, F. A. T. F. da Silva, J. B. V. Leal Jr., V. P. Silva-Filho (*) Head, Meteorology Department, FUNCEME and Professor, Applied Physical Sciences Graduate Program, UECE

2. Eusébio Station Radio-observatory linked to INPE Prospectives of cooperative agreement with FUNCEME and UECE (focus on meteorology and atmospheric physics).

3. Role of the Tropics...

4. Every year...... ITCZ visits Northeast Brazil: March-April

5. UECE’s Graduate Program Applied Physical Sciences (started working on “Meteorology and Energy” as its major research line): 16 students in March-06. Atmospheric Physics Group: 4 Ph.D.’s, 2 M.Sc., graduate and undergraduate students

6. UECE’s Research Infrastructure Instrumented Aircraft

7. Meteorological instrumentation FSSP and Csiro-King OAP 200X and 200YCCN counter Global Positioning System Data Acquisition System

8. FUNCEME: 30 years of Operational Meteorology Department of Meteorology and Oceanography: 4 Ph.D. (2 more being hired), 5 M.Sc. (2 more being hired) Infrastructure: Satellite images (NOAA, Meteosat, MSG being installed), Doppler radar (at UECE campus), 70 automatic surface stations, about 600 raingauges, 30-processor, 7 TB PC Cluster, PIRATA office

9. Observational Network Meteorological Radar Conventional Rain Gage Network DCP´s Network meteorological satellites Oceanographic Buoy PIRATA Project

10. PC cluster for climate simulations (funding for a second cluster for weather/wind energy prediction was aproved)

11. EXIMIA: EXperimento Integrado de MeteorologIA (Integrated Meteorological Experiment) 2005 – Initial Planning 2006 – Final Planning and Funding submission 2007 – Preparation, Training 2007-2008 – Field Campaigns (dry season and wet season) After that: Data analysis...

12. EXIMIA components EMAS-2 (Experimento de Mesoescala na Atmosfera do Sertão, Mesoscale Experiment in the Dry Land Atmosphere) EMfiN! (Experimento de Microfísica de Nuvens, Cloud Microphysics Experiment) Micrometeorological measurements Surface meteorological observations Radiation observations Calibration of radar, satellite and GPS-VLBI retrievals for the tropical region

13. In Place of Conclusions Nice combination of infrastructure in meteorology and atmospheric physics, personnel, operation and education+research potential Interest of cooperating with VLBI-GPS community as “end” user (the end is actually in the society) Hope to show results next time...