I have not blogged in the last two weeks as I was occupied by two week-long meetings in a row. The first one was the Cloud-Climate Feedback workshop hosted by the Keck Institute for Space Studies in Caltech, organized by Prof. Yuk Yung and Dr. Joao Teixeira. It was a very enlightening workshop. Students and postdocs got together with a number of world-renowned experts on clouds studies and had in-depth discussions about front-edge science regarding cloud climate feedbacks. Scientists shared their perspectives about the directions of future research and future missions. I was invited to talk about using conditional sampling approach to examine cloud variations and to evaluate climate models using observations. People have agreed that understanding cloud feedback is a challenging problem and deserves more coordinated efforts between modeling and observational communities.

The second meeting I went to was the Aura Science Team Meeting, held in Leiden, the Netherlands. A new feature in this year's meeting was a new "Climate" working group discussion, which Dr. Joanna Joiner and I co-chaired. I found this working group meeting was successful. We had lively discussions on how to best use Aura data for climate research. One theme was to take advantage of multi-satellite multi-sensor measurements enabled by A-train to understand climate variability and evaluate climate models. Many studies have shown the importance of simultaneous measurements. We wish there will be follow-up of A-train satellites in space to continue the "golden age" of remote sensing observations.