IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2016 - 81

MARTTI HALLIKAINEN AND JAAN PRAKS

MicroRad 2016 in Espoo, Finland

he 14th Specialist Meeting on Microwave Radiometry
and Remote Sensing of the Environment (MicroRad
2016) took place on 11-14 April 2016 on Aalto University
Campus in Espoo, Finland (Figure 1). It was hosted by the
Department of Radio Science and Engineering of Aalto
University's School of Electrical Engineering, with Martti
Hallikainen as general chair and Jaan Praks as technical
chair. See http://www.microrad2016.org for detailed information on the conference.
MicroRad is a unique gathering where the microwave
radiometry community has an opportunity to present
new designs, research results, technological advances, and
unique innovations in the field of passive microwave remote sensing. The meeting covers radiometry applications
and fields such as soil moisture and state, terrestrial snow,
sea ice, ocean salinity and dynamics, atmosphere sounding, precipitation, instrument calibration, experimental
campaigns, current and future missions, remote sensing using small satellites, theory and electromagnetic modeling,
radio frequency interference issues, and new technologies.
The MicroRad conference series dates back to 1983,
when the first MicroRad meeting was held in Rome, Italy.
All previous MicroRad meetings have been held alternately
in Italy and the United States. The 2014 meeting was organized by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL) in Pasadena, California. Recently, the
MicroRad Permanent Steering Committee,
consisting of the main organizers of all previous MicroRad meetings, wanted to expand
the scope of European venues and asked Aalto University to organize the 2016 meeting in
Finland as the first European venue outside
of Italy.
There were 51 experts that provided their
International Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Symposium-type evaluations for the 175 abstracts submitted to the MicroRad 2016 con-

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2016.2615245
Date of publication: 16 December 2016

DECember 2016

ference, resulting in three reviews for most abstracts. Unfortunately, practically all of the accepted Russian submissions
were cancelled, very likely due to the political situation
between Russia and the West. The number of registered attendees was 125 (Figure 2), which is on par with that of previous meetings in the United States and Italy.
The conference program consisted of 16 single-track
oral sessions with 78 presentations and 13 interactive
sessions with 69 presentations. The poster sessions were
scheduled within two-hour interactive sessions placed
between the afternoon oral sessions on Tuesday and
Wednesday of the conference. Additionally, the coffee
breaks and lunches were held in the immediate vicinity of
the posters, allowing for extended informal discussions.
As a new feature, three invited 30-min presentations
were included in the program. The talks were given by scientists from the JPL, European Space Agency (ESA), and
Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS):
◗ Simon Yueh (JPL), "SMAP Mission and Science Recovery Status" (Figure 3)
◗ Ville Kangas (ESA), "Current and Future Microwave Radiometers at ESA" (Figure 4)
◗ Jiancheng Shi (CAS), "Monitoring Vegetation with Microwave Radiometers" (Figure 5).

FiGUre 1. The conference venue was designed by world-renowned architect

Alvar Aalto.

ieee Geoscience and remote sensing magazine

http://www.microrad2016.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2016