It is a pleasure to have been given the responsibility for organizing the IGARSS technical program. Now in its 28th year, IGARSS is the premier conference in the remote sensing field, providing a unique opportunity for world-renowned experts in geoscience and remote sensing to meet and have meaningful and enjoyable interactions.
Consistent with last year’s IGARSS in Barcelona, the submission rate this year has been very high, with almost 2400 abstracts submitted. In order to maintain a high-quality technical program, abstracts were assigned to 1,607 reviewers by more than 30 dedicated experts on the Technical Program Committee. An average of 3.4 reviews from the wider community was received for each contributed abstract. The Technical Program Committee, which includes 45 theme coordinators/session organizers and 109 invited session organizers, met in Atlanta on February 29 to organize 1,885 accepted presentations to form the technical program.
The presentations at IGARSS 2008 are organized into 211 half sessions of 5 oral papers each and 99 interactive sessions of up to 12 posters each. The technical program covers the theme areas of geoscience, including studies of the land, oceans, atmosphere, and cryosphere; as well as the full extent of remote sensing topics, from electromagnetic modeling, design of sensors and missions, and advanced image/signal analysis techniques, to applications, education and policy.
In an effort to place more importance on the interactive sessions, posters will be displayed all day, from at least 9:00 to 18:30, each day from Monday through Thursday. At the conclusion of the last oral session of the day at 17:00, a dedicated session for poster presentations will be held from 17:00 to 18:30. Refreshments will be served in the poster and exhibit area, and all presenting authors are requested to be available at their posters during this time. This is expected to provide a valuable opportunity for interactions and technical discussions between presenters and other IGARSS participants.
Co-chairs of oral sessions are requested to keep the time schedule listed in the program regardless of any no-shows. The technical program includes only those presentations for which a presenting author had registered for the symposium by press time. Therefore, we expect very few no-shows, but the large number of parallel sessions necessitates keeping the time schedule strictly. In addition, the co-chairs of both oral and interactive sessions have been requested to record which specific presentations were presented. Those that are not presented at IGARSS will not be published in the proceedings that will be available on DVD and on IEEE Xplore following the symposium.
Panel Sessions
At this IGARSS, we have introduced a new type of session that we hope will enhance the experience at the Symposium. Four panel sessions will occur at the beginning of each day from Tuesday through Friday. Each panel session consists of a small number of extended-duration oral presentations that are focused on an emerging science application of remote sensing. We invited leaders at the frontiers of these disciplines to present the talks. The response to the invitations has been overwhelming, and we are pleased to include the talks in the technical program. We encourage you to attend these morning panel sessions in Room 210 from 8:20 to 10:00 each day from Tuesday through Friday. The panel sessions titles are listed below. In the Technical Program listing you will find an abstract under each listing that motivates the choice of panel session topics.
| Tuesday Morning: | Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP), Radiance Data Assimilation and Ocean Synoptics |
| Wednesday Morning: | Earth Science Decadal Survey NASA Missions |
| Thursday Morning: | Human and Environmental Health |
| Friday Morning: | Baseline Climate Identification and Global Change |
Acknowledgments
We thank the IGARSS 2008 Technical Program Committee wholeheartedly for their extensive and persistent hard work to formulate the technical program. In addition, there was overwhelming response from the community in reviewing the abstracts. We would like to thank the 1,607 reviewers for their generous support. Finally, Conference Management Services (CMS, Inc.) has contributed greatly to the implementation of the IGARSS 2008 technical program. We thank the professional staff and especially applaud Lance Cotton of CMS, Inc. for his outstanding support of our work.
We wish you a productive and enjoyable experience at IGARSS 2008. Enjoy the beautiful scenery and exciting culture in and around the city of Boston, the heart of New England!
Steven C. Reising, Colorado State University and Dara Entekhabi, MIT
IGARSS 2008 Technical Program Co-Chairs