The Airborne Research & Survey Facility (ARSF, formerly Airborne Remote Sensing Facility) is managed by NERC Scientific Services and Programme Management. It provides the UK environmental science community, and other potential users, with the means to obtain remotely-sensed data in support of research, survey and monitoring programmes. The ARSF is a unique service providing environmental researchers, engineers and surveyors with synoptic analogue and digital imagery of high spatial and spectral resolution.The NEODC holds the entire archive of Airborne Thematic Mapper (ATM) and Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager (CASI) data acquired by the NERC ARSF. High-resolution scanned digital versions of the entire collection of analogue photographs are now also available as well as selected LiDAR-derived elevation and terrain models for selected sites flown using the sensor.

No data was collected during this flight (VIP Demonstration).

FireMAFS was led by Prof Martin Wooster (Kings College, London) as part of QUEST Theme 3 (Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System) project. This dataset collection contains the MODIS Land Cover Type product multiple classification schemes, which describe land cover properties derived from observations spanning a year’s input of Terra and Aqua data. The data are stored in a 10 arc minute grid. Fire was the most important disturbance agent worldwide in terms of area and variety of biomass affected, a major mechanism by which carbon is transferred from the land to the atmosphere, and a globally significant source of aerosols and many trace gas species. Despite such clear coupling between fire, climate, and vegetation, fire was not modelled as an interactive component of the climate/earth systems models of full complexity or intermediate complexity, that are used to model terrestrial ecosystem processes principally for simulating CO2 exchanges. The objective of FireMAFS was to resolve these limitations by developing a robust method to forecast fire activity (fire 'danger' indices, ignition probabilities, burnt area, fire intensity etc), via a process-based model of fire-vegetation interactions, tested, improved, and constrained. This used a state-of-the-art EO data products and driven by seasonal weather forecasts issued with many months lead-time. Much of the activity of FireMAFS was shaped by the research and technical priorities of QUESTESM (earth system model). Key activities included the progressive development of the JULES-ED and SPITFIRE submodels. Fire is now very well represented in QESM (Quest Earth System Model), making progress towards a modelling capability for fire risk forecasting in the context of global change.

The International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP) has the lead role in addressing land-atmosphere interactions - process modelling, data retrieval algorithms, field experiment design and execution, and the development of global data sets. The ISLSCP II dataset contains comprehensive data over the 10 year period from 1986 to 1995, from the International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP). The ISLSCP II datasets are compiled in four key areas: land cover, hydrometeorlolgy, radiation and soils. They are mapped to consistent grids (0.5 x 0.5 degrees for topography, 1 x 1 degrees for meteorological parameters). Some data have a grid size of 0.25 x 0.25 degrees. The temporal resolution for most data sets is monthly (however a few are at finer resolution - 3 hourly). This dataset is public. ISLSCP is one of several projects of the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX), and has the lead role in addressing land-atmosphere interactions - process modelling, data retrieval algorithms, field experiment design and execution, and the development of global data sets. ISLSCP was established in 1983 under the United Nation's Environmental Programme to promote the use of satellite data for the global land surface data sets needed for climate studies. In 1994, ISLSCP produced a five-volume CD-ROM collection of global data sets to support energy, water and biogeochemical cycling studies, covering 1987 - 1988 - the ISLSCP I Initiative. The ISLSCP I data sets are available via the BADC ISLSCP I page. The ISLSCP working group meet regularly to assist Goddard Space Flight Center staff to coordinate production and publication of the various data sets in the data collection.

Under the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), the Working Group on Cloupled Modelling (WGCM) established the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) as a standard experimental protocol for studying the output of coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs). CMIP provides a community-based infrastructure in support of climate model diagnosis, validation, intercomparison, documentation and data access. This framework enables a diverse community of scientists to analyze GCMs in a systematic fashion, a process which serves to facilitate model improvement. The Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) archives much of the CMIP data. Part of the CMIP archive constitutes phase 3 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3), a collection of climate model output from simulations of the past, present and future climate. This unprecedented collection of recent model output is officially known as the "WCRP CMIP3 multi-model dataset". It is meant to serve the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Working Group 1, which focuses on the physical climate system -- atmosphere, land surface, ocean and sea ice -- and the choice of variables archived reflects this focus. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Program to assess scientific information on climate change. The IPCC publishes reports that summarize the state of the science. The research based on this dataset provided much of the new material underlying the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

The Met. Research Flight (MRF) was a Met Office facility, which operated a well instrumented C-130 Hercules (also referred to as Mk.2 Hercules) aircraft for research purposes. The C-130 was in service from 1972 to 2001 and flew over 1800 research sorties. The large capacity and long endurance of this platform made it ideal for atmospheric research in the areas of cloud physics, atmospheric radiation, atmospheric chemistry, satellite activities, mesoscale meteorology and boundary layer studies. The BADC holds data collected by the C-130 during NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) funded flights, such as those made during ACSOE (Atmospheric Chemistry Studies in the Oceanic Environment) and UTLS (Upper Troposphere - Lower Stratosphere) projects. The basic set of measurements include ozone, nitrogen oxides, water vapour, aerosols, wind, position and temperature. These are often supplemented by project specific measurements. The aircraft was able to operate scientifically throughout the troposphere from a minimum altitude of 15 m (50 ft) where permitted, up to a maximum of 10 km. The aircraft had a maximum working flight time of 12 hours. The C-130 was taken out of service in March 2001 and a new joint NERC-Met Office Facility for Airborne Aircraft Measurements (FAAM) was established operating a BAe-146-301 aircraft.

Data from the Met Office's Cyclone Database, consisting of flat files from the database covering 2000-2005 with associated charts. The database holds lists of cyclones, their types and structural information about each cyclone and associated features as derived from analysis of the UK Met Office Unified Model. Accurate prediction of severe weather events is a key Met Office goal. As cyclonic systems are responsible for the vast majority of these events, accurate cyclone prediction is also high priority. Although huge strides have been made in numerical weather prediction (NWP) in recent years, cyclonic systems continue to pose problems for numerical models. Three "exceptional" depressions in the Christmas periods of 1997 and 1999, and another in early December 1999 were all poorly forecast by most of the world's operational models, indicating that there is plenty of scope for improvement. The rationale for constructing a cyclone database (previously called the "Frontal Wave Database") is described in detail in Hewson (1998b). The main motivation was the identification and representation of systematic model biases in new formats which, from most practical perspectives, represent a notable improvement on more traditional r.m.s. error based statistics. Evidently improved knowledge of cyclone forecast characteristics will be valuable not only to the NWP community, but also to forecasting, in part because operational practice now involves using "Field Modification" software to prepare forecast charts (Carroll, 1997), which can be used to correct for known biases.

The Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) instrument was launched on the METOP satellite in October 2006 (delayed from April 2006). The European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Eumetsat) is providing funds for the Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurement (FAAM) aircraft BAe146 to be involved in validation of IASI radiative transfer and some level 2 products. Flights were flown over oceans to coincide with METOP satellite overpasses. Further flights were flown low level over specific land calibration sites to characterise land surface emissivity. There were co-incident flights with other platforms including US ER-2 or Proteus aircraft and French high altitude balloon. This dataset contains FAAM flight tracks and flight summaries, it does not, however, contain data collected by IASI on the Metop satellite.

This dataset collection contains global profiles of aerosols and clouds, ozone, nitrogen dioxide and water vapour from the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III (SAGE III) instrument on board a Meteor-3M spacecraft, launched on December 10, 2001. Routine measurement operations began in March 2002 until the SAGE III mission was terminated in March 2006. The specific measurement objectives of SAGE III provided 1 km vertical resolution profiles of: aerosols and clouds at seven wavelengths from the mid-troposphere into the stratosphere and, where appropriate, the mesosphere; O3 from the mid-troposphere to 85 km; H2O from the planetary boundary layer to 50 km; NO2 from the tropopause to 45 km; NO3 from 20 to 55 km; OClO from 15 to 25 km; and, O2 from the mid-troposphere to 70 km.

The Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) is an instrument built and operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The instrument uses backscattered ultraviolet radiance to infer total column ozone measurements. The data consists of daily gridded averages of total ozone covering the entire globe. The original Nimbus-7 TOMS operated from November 1978 until May 1993. Meteor-3 TOMS was launched in August 1991 and operated until December 1994. These CDs contain the total ozone and UV radiance data.