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Introduction
The Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) was initially designed in the late-1980s and early-1990s as a facility instrument for NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS). Since its inception, NASA's Langley Research Center (LaRC) has led this effort. CERES has a long history with seven different instruments flying on five different missions since 1997. As of today, six CERES instruments remain in orbit - two are no longer operational: the Proto-Flight Model (PFM) unit flew on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and functioned for a brief period, and FM2, which was powered-off in January 2025 due to battery constraints on Terra. The active CERES instruments are found on Terra (FM1), Aqua (FM3 and 4), the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) (FM5), and the first Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS-1) mission, now known as NOAA-20 (FM6). Suomi NPP and the JPSS mission are partnerships between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which owns the satellites, and NASA, which operates them.
The CERES Team has maintained a history of its Science Team (ST) Meetings, recorded in The Earth Observer. The first CERES STM to be mentioned in the newsletter was the third meeting [Jan. 1990, 2:1, 7], which was listed on the "EOS Calendar." The earliest full STM summary captured events from the seventh meeting in Fall 1992, CERES Science Team [Jan.-Feb. 1993, 5:1, 11-16]. Since then, the periodic reports (typically spring and fall) have kept readers up to date on the status of the CERES instruments in orbit and the science results from the data gathered. With such a long history of published meeting summaries, it seems fitting that a report on the state of CERES should be among the last articles published by The Earth Observer.
The most recent CERES contribution to The Earth Observer was the article, Update on the State of CERES and Highlights from Recent Science Team Meetings [Sept.-Oct. 2023, 35:5, 43-53]. Since that time, CERES has held four STMs - bringing the total to 42. Norman Loeb [LaRC-CERES Principal Investigator (PI)] hosted all the meetings.
The four most recent meetings were:
- The 39th CERES STM (Fall 2023) at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, Oct. 17-19, 2023.
- The 40th CERES STM (Spring 2024) at LaRC in Hampton, VA, May 14-16, 2024.
- The 41st CERES STM (Fall 2024) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA, Oct. 1-3, 2024; and
- The 42nd CERES STM (Spring 2025) at LaRC, May 13-15, 2025.
A Fall 2025 meeting had been scheduled at LaRC from Oct. 28-30, 2025, but was cancelled due to the Federal Government shutdown. Planning is underway for another meeting to be held in Spring 2026.
This article will focus on the Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 meetings - drawing primarily from the State of CERES presentation, programmatic content, and mission and instrument status reports delivered at those meetings. The sections on the State of CERES and Invited Presentations also include content from the Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 meetings. The Contributed Presentations from these latter meetings are not included in this article. For more details the reader is directed to the CERES website where agendas and links to individual presentations can be found for all four meetings.
