Chapter 11
THE ROLE OF REMOTE SENSING IN LAND
SURFACE EXPERIMENTS WITHIN BAHC AND
ISLSCP
A. Jochum (1), P. Kabat (2) and R. Hutjes (2)
(1) Wageningen Agricultural University and (2) DLO Staring Centre, Wageningen, The
Netherlands.
1.
BACKGROUND
The growing concern, both within the scientific community and
governments, about the possibility of climate change induced by the
continued expansion of human activities led to the establishment of major
international programs devoted to issues of global change.
The World Climate Research Program (WCRP) was established in 1980,
jointly supported by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the
International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) and the Intergovernmental
Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO. Its purpose is “to develop
the fundamental scientific understanding of the climate system and climate
processes that is needed to determine to which extent climate can be
predicted and the extent of man’s influence on climate”.
WCRP aims both at designing and implementing observational and
diagnostic research activities and at developing global models. It is pursuing
its activities in the following components:
ACSYS: Arctic Climate System Study;
CLIVAR: Climate Variability and Predictability;
GEWEX: Global energy and Water Cycle Experiment;
SPARC: Stratospheric Processes and their Role in Climate;
WOCE: World Ocean Circulation Experiment.
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M.M. Verstraete et al. (eds.), Observing Land from Space: Science, Customers and Technology, 91–103.
© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.