AQ CoP General Descriptions

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Husar: GEO Air Quality Community of Practice, MACC, Utrecht May 2011

MACC Conference on Monitoring and Forecasting Atmospheric Composition Utrecht, 23-27 May 2011
SESSION 6: Open discussion of user needs, feedback and future directions
Rudolf B. Husar: GEO Air Quality Community of Practice
Washington Univeristy, St. Louis, MO, USA

GEO AQ CoP is a self- organized group working together to foster application of Earth observations to Air Quality, connecting GEO to the broader user communities and leveraging synergies of collaboration. Rather than competing, it connects and supports the activities of other data integration and dissemination initiatives. Community activities include teleconferences; collaborative website; virtual workshops; gathering user requirements; recording best practices; participation in GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilots and supporting several GEO Tasks.

The main tangible output facilitated by the AQ CoP is the emerging network of interoperable air quality/atmospheric composition data servers (currently 7) that use international OGC WCS/WMS standard data access protocols. The main role of the CoP is to connect and enable this network, as a System of Systems for Air Quality guided by: What few things must be the same so that everything else can be different? The content of the network's data and metadata is accessible through a distributed catalog of shared data resources. The core network content includes datasets from surface-based monitoring networks (7), satellite sensors (5), as well as global/regional models (3), including the MACC global aerosol model.