Table of Contents

1. Editorial
2. ISARS '98 Conference
3. ISARS WWW-Site
4. "Market-Place" for Sodar Operators and Data Users
5. Other News
6. How to Contact the Editor

1. Editorial

Dear ISARS members, dear colleagues,

this newsletter probably comes as a surprise to you, as it is a new idea which has not been discussed at our last symposium in Moscow, May 1996. However, we are sure that you will appreciate this possibility for communication within our acoustic remote sensing community between the symposia. We intend to publish this newsletter on a minimum cost basis about twice a year, primarily in electronic form and in addition on paper for those who don´t have access to electronic mail. The electronic issue may be distributed even more frequently; in this case, the paper issue will contain the accumulated electronic issues.

The Newsletter will inform about the ISARS Symposia, major additions to the new ISARS web site (see below), other relevant conferences, and of course all the news which you are going to send us. The purpose of the Newsletter is information exchange, so please go ahead and let us know about your new developments, findings, projects, publications .... Send us announcements of relevant conferences in your part of the world, and anything else that is of interest to our community.

The present issue of the Newsletter goes to everyone listed in the ISARS address file. In addition, it is posted on the ISARS WWW-site. If you found it there or got it from a colleague and you want to be put on the mailing list, please give us your name and address, especially your email address as we send paper copies only to those who have no access to electronic mail.

Petra Seibert, editor

2. ISARS '98 Conference

The 9th International Symposium on Acoustic Remote Sensing and Associated Techniques of the Atmosphere and Oceans is organized by the International Society for Acoustic Remote Sensing (ISARS). ISARS grew from a series of workshops begun in the early 1970s. In the beginning of the 1980s, a bi-annual series of symposia was started. The latest symposia where held in Boulder (1994) and Moscow (1996).

The Institute of Meteorology and Physics of the Universitaet fuer Bodenkultur (BOKU) is the official host of the 9th Symposium to be held in Vienna, Austria, in the week of 6-10 July 1998. The conference will include theoretical and experimental studies of propagation and scattering of sound in the atmosphere and ocean, studies of atmospheric and oceanic boundary layers, flow phenomena in complex terrain, and applications to urban and rural air quality problems, as observed by remote sounding systems. Presentations on integrated environmental observing systems with acoustic, lidar and radar techniques are also encouraged.

A workshop especially devoted to applications of remote sounding will be included in the symposium. It will bring together experienced sodar scientists, manufacturers and end users, and entice discussions.

3. ISARS WWW site (http://www.boku.ac.at/imp/isars/)

As agreed in Moscow, we have started to provide information on ISARS and its activities on the WorldWideWeb (short: WWW or web). For those of you who don't know the WWW: this is a new way of electronic communication, where texts and pictures provided on a computer linked to the internet can be viewed from any other computer with internet connection, provided you have a suitable programme called browser (a common browser is Netscape [TM]). The special feature is that "links" can be put in these documents which point to related documents, so that one can easily move from one "web page" to another, irrespective of the physical location of these documents. There are search tools available on the internet, and if you, e.g., search for "ISARS" with the AltaVista search programme, you will get a list of about a dozen references, including our home page (the "home" page is the document where you usually start reading at a certain site, similar to the "root" directory on a computer).

The present contents of the web site is as follows:

- What is ISARS ?
- What is Acoustic Remote Sensing ?
- List of ISARS Symposia and Publications
- ISARS '98 Symposium Information
- ISARS Structure and Contact Persons
- Links Related to Acoustic Sounding and to Homepages of ISARS Members
- ISARS Newsletter

The section "What is acoustic remote sensing" is still empty. You are welcome to provide a short introductory text.

The list of the Symposia is complete, the list of publications not yet (please help us).

The ISARS '98 page will provide the latest information about the conference. Circulars and call for papers as well as all other relevant information will be posted there.

The list of the contact persons contains the names and addresses of the Outstanding Members and the Executive Members as agreed upon in Moscow. If you belong to one of these groups, please check whether your name, address, and so on is complete and correct (especially email address!).

The "links related to acoustic sounding and to homepages of ISARS members" is an offer to you - send us your URL (address of your web pages - gopher or ftp sites are also acceptable) so that we can include it. We expect that more and more institutes will set up web sites in the near future so that this section will be able to give a good overview of "who is who" in acoustic remote sensing. Vice versa, we hope that you will put a link to the ISARS web site into your pages. Presently, it contains a list of manufacturers; please notify us of any corrections or additions to this list.

4. "Market-Place" for Sodar / Doppler Current Profiler (DCP) Operators and Data Users

A new idea to promote the application of acoustic remote sensing in research projects is the "market-place". The ISARS web site could contain a list of institutes which operate sodars / DCPs and are interested to provide measurements, including list of equipment and specifications as well as previous projects. Ideas how potential users of data can be made aware of the web site are still needed, however. If you are interested in this service, please contact us.

5. Other News

5.1 Bound.-Layer Meterol. - Special Issue 7th ISARS

The special issue of Boundary Layer Meteorology with 7 contributions to the ISARS '94 Symposium has appeared as Vol. 81 No. 1 (October 1996). The contributions, edited by W.D. Neff, are by Beyrich et al., Seibert and Langer, Coulter and Martin, Soler et al., Asimakopoulos et al., Petenko et al. and Argentini et al. and cover a total of 103 pages.

5.2 Profiler Workshop (Engelberg/Switzerland, May 1997)

The International Profiler Workshop organized by the European COST-76 Action will take place in Engelberg, Switzerland, May 12-16, 1997. The deadline for submission of contributions has passed. Further information may be obtained from: Profiler Workshop, Atmospheric Science, ETH Hoenggerberg, CH-8093 Zuerich, Switzerland, or by email: pws@atmos.umnw.ethz.ch.

6. How to contact the editor:

You can contact me by mail:

Dr. Petra Seibert
Institute of Meteorology and Physics
BOKU
Tuerkenschanzstr. 18
A-1180 Wien
Austria

by phone: +43-1-470.58.20-20,
by fax: +43-1-470.58.20-60,
by email: seibert@boku.ac.at_NO_JUNK_MAIL

Back to ISARS homepage

last update: 28 Feb 1997 / P. Seibert