COCCON Membership

Requirements and general information for those interested in joining the network

Participation in COCCON is realized by publication of XGAS data derived from EM27/SUN DC coupled double-sided interferograms on ESA's EVDC data portal. The use of the official COCCON processing tools is mandatory in order to maintain consistency in the data set across the network and in the processing of the measurements. The tools are all open source and published under GNU GPL.

The amount of data to be published and timeliness of data provision is decided by the member. Provision of all observations would be great, but also only subsets are fine. There is no strict network requirement on timeliness. Obviously, current data would ideally be published earlier, but even "outdated" data is accepted and published. If, for any reason, the member would like the raw data to be deleted after processing, it can be requested. 

There are various options for publishing data: 

  1. You provide raw data, including aux data and essentially measured ground pressure, to the COCCON Central Facility (CF) and the person responsible for the centralized data processing carries out all processing, including data publication. The raw data are kept by COCCON, but do not get published.
  2. You do the preprocessing of interferograms by yourself, using the official COCCON tools, and only transmit the resulting spectra, including aux data and measured ground pressure. The level 2 processing, resulting in XGAS data, as well as the EVDC publication, are done by us. 
  3. You carry out all processing by yourself and forward the results generated by PROFFAST to us. The XGAS and XAIR results are checked for quality. If everything looks fine, the GEOMS compliant Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) file gets generated and the data publication performed. 

Please note that the ownership of the data is not relinquished. For the published derived EVDC data, the group providing the dataset will be specified as data originator, and the EVDC data protocol applies to the published data, which aims at protecting your Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). Essentially, authors of publications who are heavily involved with the published data should invite the data originators for coauthorship. If the use is marginal, then at least the datasets used need to be properly cited (each EVDC dataset is assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)). TCCON is an example for the application of comparable requirements, but the possibility of misuse can never be ruled out completely. 

Each EM27/SUN spectrometer is characterized within the framework of the pre-commissioning process at KIT, involving laboratory and solar side-by-side measurements. The result of this procedure is the best estimate for the Instrumental Line Shape (ILS) parameters. These are collected in the table ILSList, which is updated regularly. The parameters suggested should be used for the own data analysis unless there are frequent indications that they are suboptimal, which would lead to an update of the parameters. The gas- and instrument specific calibration factors, which also result from the pre-commissioning tests, are applied when generating the final HDF files.

Beyond this, COCCON offers regular telephone conferences, approximately every two months to quarterly. These telecons and the mailing list used for the invitations are used for spreading COCCON-relevant news. Generally, to have some fixed structure of the telecon, a scientific or technical/practical talk is provided in each telecon, typically provided by EM27/SUN operators. For being added to the mailing list, you find the responsible person via the pages Contact or Telephone Conferences.