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Earth's Spectrally Resolved Reflected Radiation - TRUTHS for Climate Workshop

The international climate science and modelling community is invited to participate in the TRUTHS for Climate Workshop, organised by the European Space Agency (ESA).

TRUTHS: Setting the gold standard reference for climate applications and satellite inter-calibration. 

The Traceable Radiometry Underpinning Terrestrial - and Helio-Studies, TRUTHS, mission will be a ‘metrology laboratory in space’, setting ‘gold standard’ reference at unprecedented radiometric accuracy (0.3%, k=2) in the UV-VIS-SWIR domain. TRUTHS is explicitly designed to re-calibrate itself in–orbit directly to a primary standard of the international system of units (SI). 

Carrying a cryogenic solar absolute radiometer and a hyperspectral imaging spectrometer as well as a novel onboard calibration system, TRUTHS will enhance by up to an order-of-magnitude our ability to estimate the spectrally resolved Earth Solar Reflected Radiation Budget through direct measurements of incoming and outgoing energy and through partnership with other missions. The exceptional accuracy is required to shorten the time-to-detect trends and provide accurate timely inputs about the Earth system to policy-makers. 

TRUTHS will effectively establish fiducial EO reference data in space, whose SI-traceability can be extended to other sensors through in-flight cross-calibration. This will be achieved directly via simultaneous observations and indirectly via vicarious calibration (e.g. CEOS) targets, improving other missions’ services who are delivering Essential Climate Variables products. As a traveling standard and by transfer of SI-traceability, TRUTHS will contribute to harmonising contemporary and historical multi-platform climate data records.