HIRDLS Science Meeting Oxford (20 Sep 2006) Presentations

Selection of presentations given at the HIRDLS Science Meeting Oxford on the 20th September 2006

Immersive Worlds: an exploration of how performers facilitate the Three Worlds in Immersive Performance

This research will consider the notion that the immersive performance event consists of Three Worlds-The Fictional, Now and Imaginary and how an understanding of the qualities of these three worlds, in particular the Now and the Imaginary, are instrumental to a performer’s training in creating immersive theatre. To do this, the research draws upon facilitation techniques from applied drama, mapping some of the fundamental skills required from a performer making immersive theatre, that has yet to be articulated by the field. It argues that the use of core facilitation skills such as rapport, listening, reading micro gestures and effective questioning, can be used by the performer to effectively manage the demands of the Now and Imaginary worlds. To illustrate this, the paper examines a creative training day with recent graduate drama students from Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) and students from the Community Drama degree at Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA), as well as drawing upon the authors’ collective experience of creating and performing in immersive theatre. A key insight from the training day was for student/performers to gain an understanding into the audience member's experiences in immersive performance and how this consideration impacts on the performer's practice. The findings are significant for companies, directors, and performers interested in utilizing immersive theatre to inform the creation of immersive work

NASA HIRDLS and ESA MIPAS data product comparison (And other ground data)

The HIRDLS instrument is a limb viewing infra-red radiometer on the NASA Aura spacecraft in a sun synchronous low earth orbit and obtains measurements of the composition of the atmosphere covering the whole Earth each day. The MIPAS instrument is a limb viewing infra-red interferometer on board the European Envisat satellite in a very similar orbit to Aura except that the local solar time is different. The complement of geophysical data products of both instruments is very similar, and because of similar observation strategies their two data sets can be usefully compared. The comparison provides the means to support validation in order to obtain statistics such as systematic differences and variance. This is performed over the full latitude range of HIRDLS and height range of MIPAS and thereby helps to identify sources of errors. The identification of known atmospheric features is a useful diagnostic, and includes such things as regions of upwelling of tracer gases, or the propagation of coherent structures as with mid-latitude waves and we can test whether these structures are consistently represented in both data sets. HIRDLS version 2.04.19 (v004) temperature, ozone and nitric acid show very low systematic 'errors' compared to MIPAS over most of the spatial range. Currently pre-released water vapour, nitrous oxide and F-11 are reasonably similar, CH4 somewhat more restricted, and nitrogen dioxide, N2O5, chlorine nitrate and F-12 as yet susceptible to complications from the obstructed telescope. Further details are discussed in the paper

Prelaunch radiometric calibration of the HIRDLS flight instrument: Results and use in on-orbit data processing

Results from the prelaunch radiometric calibration of the 21-channel High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder (HIRDLS) flight instrument are presented. The calibration was carried out in the Department of Physics of Oxford University. Two large aperture external blackbody cavities were used to generate stable radiances at target temperatures between ~90 and ~320 K. These blackbodies were located, along with the HIRDLS instrument, inside a large vacuum chamber. Data were taken at three different focal-plane temperatures ( ~61, ~66, and ~71 K). To complicate matters beyond the initial scope of the prelaunch calibration, a failure of some contamination close-out material (Kapton) that lined the inner fore-optics cavity occurred during launch, which made the original in-flight radiometric calibration procedure impossible. Accordingly, the radiometric conversion algorithm had to be changed, requiring more information from prelaunch calibration to be used than first envisioned. This paper discusses a variety of details, such as data-taking procedures, analysis methodology, associated error analyses, and necessary changes to the radiometric conversion algorithm needed for in-flight data processing. © 1980-2012 IEEE