By David M. Le Vine -NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, USA.

MicroRad2010, the 11th Specialist Meeting on Microwave Radiometry and Remote Sensing Applications, was held in Washington, D.C. on March 1–4 at the Hilton Washington Embassy Row hotel. The meeting attracted 205 registrants.

The purpose of MicroRad is to provide an international forum to report and discuss recent achievements in the field of microwave radiometry for remote sensing applications, especially remote sensing of the environment. MicroRad2010 was the 11th meeting in this biannual series which began in Rome in 1983 and has alternated location between Italy and United States. The next meeting will be in Frascati, Italy in the Spring, 2012.

The meeting has become a venue for the microwave radiometry community to present new research results, instrument designs and applications to an audience that is conversant in these issues. This was particularly evident at MicroRad2010 which began with the first public report by the SMOS project of the images from the first synthetic aperture (interferometer) L-band radiometer in space. The meeting was divided into 16 sessions:
Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Mission
Future Passive Microwave Remote Sensing Missions
Theory and Physical Principles of EM Models
Field Experiment Results
Soil Moisture and Vegetation
Snow and Cryosphere
Passive/Active Microwave Remote Sensing Synergy
Oceans
Atmospheric Sounding and Assimilation
Clouds and Precipitation
Instruments and Advanced Techniques I
Instruments and Advanced Techniques II
Cross Calibration of Satellite Radiometers
Calibration Theory and Methodology
New Technologies for Microwave Radiometry
Radio Frequency Interference

The meeting consisted of one serial sequence of oral presentations divided into the sessions listed above and two evening sessions at which posters related to these topics were presented. The poster sessions were well attended and provided an opportunity to both socialize and to learn in more detail about the work being done in microwave radiometry. Awards were made to the outstanding posters in each session. The winners were:

Laupattarakasem, et al.

Poster Session I (Monday)

1st Place: IMPROVED HIGH WIND SPEED RETRIEVALS USING AMSR AND THE NEXT GENERATION NASA DUAL FREQUENCY SCATTEROMETER

Peth Laupattarakasem, Suleiman Alsweiss, Salem El-Nimri, W. Linwood Jones, Svetla Veleva, Bryan Stiles, Ernesto Rodriguez, and Robert Gaston (University of Central Florida and Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Ferrazzoli, et al.

2nd Place: AMSR-E OBSERVATIONS OF RAIN AND FLOOD EVENTS OVER VEGETATED AREAS OF LA PLATA BASIN

Paolo Ferrazzoli, Rachid Rahmoune, Francisco Grings; Vanesa Douna, Gabriela Parmuchi, Mercedes Salvia, Haydee Karszenbaum (Tor Vergata University and Institute of Astronomy and Space Physics, Buenos Aires, AR)

Poster Session II (Wednesday)

Iturbide-sanchez, et al.

1st Place: DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF A RAINFALL RATE ALGORITHM BASED ON HYDROMETEOR PRODUCTS DERIVED FROM PASSIVE MICROWAVE SATELLITE OBSERVATIONS

Flavio Iturbide-Sanchez, Sid-Ahmed Boukabara, Kevin Garrett, Christopher Grassotti, Wanchun Chen, Fuzhong Weng (NOAA/NESDIS).

Moon and Kim.

2nd Place: PASSIVE RANGE MEASUREMENT AND DISCREPANCY EFFECTS OF DISTANCE FOR STEREO SCANNING W-BAND RADIOMETER

Nam-Won Moon and Yong-Hoon Kim (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea)

A proceedings consisting of short papers submitted by the authors of both the oral and poster presentations is being prepared and will be available via IEEE Xplore.

Also, a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (TGARS) will be devoted to MicroRad2010. Contributions to the Special Issue will be limited to papers presented at Microrad2010 but both oral and poster presentations are included. The special issue is a peer reviewed publication. It will appear in addition to the conference proceedings which will contain the “short papers” delivered at the time of the conference. Submission should follow the IEEE/TGARS guidelines. The guest editors are Roger Lang, Tom Jackson, Ed Kim and David LeVine and the deadline for submission is July 1, 2010 (right before IGARSS).