The Open Session on atmosphere, land and ocean monitoring aims at presenting highlights of recent results obtained through observations and modelling as well as relevant reviews in these fields.

The session is intended as an open forum for interdisciplinary discussion between representatives of different fields. Thus, we welcome especially overarching presentations which may be interesting to a wider community.

Observations are one major link to get an overall picture of processes within the Earth environment during measurement campaigns. This includes application to derive atmospheric parameters, surface properties of vegetation, soil and minerals and dissolved or suspended matter in inland water and the ocean. Ground based systems and data sets from ships, aircraft and satellites are key information sources to complement the overall view. All of these systems have their pros and cons, but a comprehensive view of the observed system is generally best obtained by means of a combination of all of them.

The validation of operational satellite systems and applications is a topic that has come increasingly into focus with the European Copernicus program in recent years. The development of smaller state-of-the-art instruments, the combination of more and more complex sets of instruments simultaneously on one platform, with improved accuracy and high data acquisition speed together with high accuracy navigation and inertial measurements enables more complex campaign strategies even on smaller aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).

This session will bring together a multidisciplinary research community to present:

• Atmosphere-land-ocean (or inland water) system modelling and validation
• new instruments (Lidar, etc), platforms (UAV etc.), setups and use in multidisciplinary approaches
• Larger scale in-situ and remote sensing observation networks from various platforms (ground based, airborne, ship-borne, satellite)
• recent field campaigns and their outcomes
• (multi-) aircraft campaigns
• satellite calibration/validation campaigns
• sophisticated instrument setups and observations
• advanced instrument developments
• UAV applications