Observing Land from Space: Science, Customers and Technology

On January 8, 2008, executives at MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA), a systems engineering firm centered in Vancouver, British Columbia, triggered a political firestorm by announcing that, subject to regulatory approval by the governments of Canada and the United States, shareholders had approved the sale of the firm's space business to Alliant Techsystems (ATK), an aerospace company and manufacturer of land mines, cluster bombs, and missiles headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Daniel Friedmann, MDA's chief executive since 1995, argued the sale would “allow the company to focus management and financial resources exclusively on its rapidly growing information products business,” particularly the firm's property-information systems for those “involved in real estate-related transactions such as the buying, selling, conveyancing, mortgage financing, and insurance of properties.”

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Radiation transfer model intercomparison (RAMI) exercise

Pinty¹,

Gobron²,

Widlowski³

et al. 2001

J. Geophys. Res.

153

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Abstract. The community involved in modeling radiation transfer over terrestrial surfaces designed and implemented the first phase of a radiation transfer model intercomparison (RAMI) exercise. This paper discusses the rationale and motivation for this endeavor, presents the intercomparison protocol as well as the evaluation procedures, and describes the principal results. Participants were asked to simulate the transfer of radiation for a variety of precisely defined terrestrial environments and illumination conditions. These were abstractions of typical terrestrial systems and included both homogeneous and heterogeneous scenes. The differences between the results generated by eight different models, including both one-dimensional and three-dimensional approaches, were then documented and analyzed. RAMI proposed a protocol to quantitatively assess the consequences of the model discrepancies with respect to application, such as those motivating the development of physically based inversion procedures. This first phase of model intercomparison has already proved useful in assessing the ability of the modeling community to generate similar radiation fields despite the large panoply of models that were tested. A detailed analysis of the results also permitted to identify apparent "outliers" and their main deficiencies. Future undertakings in this intercomparison framework must be oriented toward an expansion of RAMI into other and more complex geophysical systems as well as the focusing on actual inverse problems.

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Observing Land from Space: Science, Customers and Technology

Cited by 6 publications

References 89 publications

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Radiation transfer model intercomparison (RAMI) exercise

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