Wednesday 26 November 2014 Speaker: Caroline Poulsen (RAL/Space Science - Remote Sensing Group) Title: "Monitoring the Earth's Climate from space" Abstract: Climate change is arguably the greatest environmental challenge facing us in the twenty-first century. Its importance has been recognised in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Observations from space provide unique information that greatly assists in the successful understanding and management of climate change. Critical to this work is the information provided by the Advanced-ATSR (Along Track Scanning Radiometer) instrument, its precursor ATSR-2 and follow on instruments SLSTR (Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer) have a long history at RAL with RAL Space being involved in the design, building and calibration of the instruments. The excellent calibration and long-time series of these instruments, required for their primary mission of monitoring surface temperature, also make them well suited for long term observations of the properties of clouds and aerosols. Scientists at RAL are delivering long time series of the properties of clouds and aerosols – particulates on the order of 1 micron in size suspended in the air. In this talk I will discuss the impact of clouds and aerosols on climate and discuss the work we are doing as part of the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative to create climate quality satellite data sets of aerosol and cloud properties form the ATSR series of instruments (see www.esa-aerosol-cci.org and www.esa-cloud-cci.org for more information on these projects).