Thank for accepting our invitation to the HIAPER Workshop. If you have not already made travel arrangements, please do so. Please keep in mind that ATD will pay your housing costs for the meeting.
Now, we ask need your help in preparations for the workshop. We intend that workshop participants will develop a consensus view regarding aircraft capabilities and aircraft modifications and will make a start on determining primary instrumentation requirements. We plan to spend part of our time in several working groups focussed on a few sets of aircraft missions. Detailed work by the groups on these missions will feed directly into our discussions of capabilities, modifications, and primary instruments, and also give the group some early indications of needs for specific research instruments.
We ask that each of you prepare a one-to-two paragraph description of a plausible research objective and of the broad outlines of the flight and instrument requirements. If possible, please focus your mission scenario in one of the scientific areas listed below, taken directly from the HIAPER Implementation Plan. I drafted a description of a biology/ecology mission.
We plan to post these scenarios in advance of the workshop so that participants can begin to consider capability and instrument requirements. We will also use them to develop our plans for cross-cutting sessions on modifications, instrumentation, etc. Please send your contributions to me by e-mail as soon as possible, preferably before 3 May. From my experience, this task should take minutes, not hours. You might want to review the section of the UCAR-NCAR proposal to NSF that discusses the scientific opportunities for HIAPER (pages 3-10) and the sections on instrumentation (pages 41-47). Thank you very much for your quick help with this. These scenarios represent a key part of the workshop discussions and we need your contributions.
David Carlson, Director
Atmospheric Technology Division, NCAR