New Developments and Applications in Optical Radiometry IV

The Proceedings published in this special issue of Metrologia are from New Developments and Applications in Optical Radiometry IV, also known as the NEWRAD '92 Conference. The conference was held from 5–7 October 1992 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, and was organized through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The 1992 Conference was the fourth in a series of occasional international meetings held to integrate the activities of the space radiometry community with those of the laboratory metrology community. The location of Maryland was chosen to bring the meeting back to the hemisphere of the Americas where the first of the series was held. NASA/Goddard was chosen as the sponsoring organization for this meeting because of the number and diversity of space measurement programmes which are managed there, and because of its proximity to the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology. The general organization of the meeting included sessions on the Earth Observing System (which I chaired), the Shuttle Atlas I Mission and UV Calibrations (chaired by E Hilsenrath, NASA/Goddard), Cryogenic Radiometry (N Fox, NPL), Detector Radiometry (T Quinn, BIPM), Space-based Applications (J Metzdorf, PTB) and Ground-based Applications (C Cromer, NIST). Thirty-eight papers were presented orally, and poster sessions were also provided. Most of the presentations are represented in these Proceedings. The fifth meeting in this occasional series is scheduled for 19–21 September 1994 in Berlin. The Conference institutional host is the PTB, and the convener is Dr Joachim Fischer, Secretary. The success of the meeting derived principally from the individual contributions of the presenters and the interest and attention of all the participants. The success of these Proceedings is attributable to the individual authors, the guest editors and the referees of the papers. Each paper was subjected to a critical review which was organized by the chairman of the session in which the paper was presented. The work of the guest editors and referees is gratefully acknowledged. The drawing together of the papers in Metrologia format was carried out most capably by Dr David Blackburn and his staff. Without his help and encouragement the review process may never have converged to produce this publication.