Creating daily analyses of surface air temperature globally
The University of Leicester is one of the UK's leading research and teaching universities. The University of Leicester is, according to the Times newspaper, "An award winning institution attracting top academics". The University has 19,000 students, including 8,000 at postgraduate level. There are 34 academic departments located in five faculties: Arts, Law, Medicine and Biological Sciences, Science and Social Sciences. There is a University-wide Graduate School and an Institute of Lifelong Learning. The University employs approximately 3,500 staff.
The Earth Observation Science group is an interdisciplinary team based in the Departments of Physics/Astronomy, Chemistry and Geography. A strong component of the team, led by Professor John Remedios, is based in the Space Research Centre of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, which houses one of the largest space research groups in Europe. The group particularly focuses on the use of Earth Observation (EO) space systems to understand regional and global causes of variability of climate, particularly in the land/ocean surface and the atmosphere; other remote sensing systems are also extensively used such as aircraft, ground-based, and ship-borne sensors.
The group has a strong foundation in leading space research, particularly at European level both with the European Space Agency and with the European Commission; and are also strongly involved in Copernicus: i) SLSTR LST L2 algorithm providers ii) Sentinel 3 ground segment design; iii) the Geoland-2 core service, iv) the CAMELOT study defining the requirements for the atmosphere missions of Sentinels 4 and 5; v) the UK GMES networking groups (Professor J. Remedios chairs the atmosphere group); and vi) the Sentinel Convoy studies (scientific lead) both for Land and Atmosphere to identify gaps in current/planned measurements. Studies of the AATSR and Sentinel-3 mission are key projects in the EOS group. The Leicester PI team for ATSR has been leading the ATSR programme since 1993. The PI team have been particularly concerned to support algorithm developments, assess data quality and analyse long-term time series of sea surface temperature, and land surface temperature. The group has been supported by ESA to develop the LST algorithms for AATSR and SLSTR on Sentinel-3, and has produced the latest LST ATBDs for these instruments.
University of Leicester leads WP3 of EUSTACE on Validation and Intercomparison and undertook the quantification of uncertainties in land surface skin temperature retrievals in WP1.