Big Decisions and Sparse Data: Adapting Scientific Publishing to the Needs of Practical Conservation

The biggest challenge in conservation biology is breaking down the gap between research and practical management. A major obstacle is the fact that many researchers are unwilling to tackle projects likely to produce sparse or messy data because the results would be difficult to publish in refereed journals. The obvious solution to sparse data is to build up results from multiple studies. Consequently, we suggest that there needs to be greater emphasis in conservation biology on publishing papers that can be built on by subsequent research rather than on papers that produce clear results individually. This building approach requires: (1) a stronger theoretical framework, in which researchers attempt to anticipate models that will be relevant in future studies and incorporate expected differences among studies into those models; (2) use of modern methods for model selection and multi-model inference, and publication of parameter estimates under a range of plausible models; (3) explicit incorporation of prior information into each case study; and (4) planning management treatments in an adaptive framework that considers treatments applied in other studies. We encourage journals to publish papers that promote this building approach rather than expecting papers to conform to traditional standards of rigor as stand-alone papers, and believe that this shift in publishing philosophy would better encourage researchers to tackle the most urgent conservation problems.

A three-dimensional magnetometer for motion sensing of a balloon-carried atmospheric measurement package

An instrument is described which carries three orthogonal geomagnetic field sensors on a standard meteorological balloon package, to sense rapid motion and position changes during ascent through the atmosphere. Because of the finite data bandwidth available over the UHF radio link, a burst sampling strategy is adopted. Bursts of 9s of measurements at 3.6Hz are interleaved with periods of slow data telemetry lasting 25s. Calculation of the variability in each channel is used to determine position changes, a method robust to periods of poor radio signals. During three balloon ascents, variability was found repeatedly at similar altitudes, simultaneously in each of three orthogonal sensors carried. This variability is attributed to atmospheric motions. It is found that the vertical sensor is least prone to stray motions, and that the use of two horizontal sensors provides no additional information over a single horizontal sensor

Observations of the diurnal cycle of outgoing longwave radiation from the Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget instrument

The Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget instrument on Meteosat-8, located over Africa, provides unprecedented temporal sampling (~17 minutes) of the broadband emitted thermal and reflected solar radiances. We analyse the diurnal cycle of the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) fluxes derived from the thermal radiances for July 2006. Principal component (PC) analysis separates the signals of the surface temperature response to solar heating and of the development of convective clouds. The first two PCs explain most of the OLR variations: PC1 (surface heating) explains 82.3% of the total variance and PC2 (cloud development) explains 12.8% of the variance. Convection is initiated preferentially over mountainous regions and the cloud then advects downstream in the ambient flow. Diurnal variations are much weaker over the oceans, but a coherent signal over the Gulf of Guinea suggests that the cloudiness is modulated by the diurnally varying contrast between the Gulf and the adjacent land mass.

The Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget Project

This paper reports on a new satellite sensor, the Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget (GERB) experiment. GERB is designed to make the first measurements of the Earth's radiation budget from geostationary orbit. Measurements at high absolute accuracy of the reflected sunlight from the Earth, and the thermal radiation emitted by the Earth are made every 15 min, with a spatial resolution at the subsatellite point of 44.6 km (north–south) by 39.3 km (east–west). With knowledge of the incoming solar constant, this gives the primary forcing and response components of the top-of-atmosphere radiation. The first GERB instrument is an instrument of opportunity on Meteosat-8, a new spin-stabilized spacecraft platform also carrying the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared (SEVIRI) sensor, which is currently positioned over the equator at 3.5°W. This overview of the project includes a description of the instrument design and its preflight and in-flight calibration. An evaluation of the instrument performance after its first year in orbit, including comparisons with data from the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) satellite sensors and with output from numerical models, are also presented. After a brief summary of the data processing system and data products, some of the scientific studies that are being undertaken using these early data are described. This marks the beginning of a decade or more of observations from GERB, as subsequent models will fly on each of the four Meteosat Second Generation satellites.