Second Announcement

Dear Colleagues,

This is the second announcement regarding the "15 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry" Symposium, issuing the Call for Papers.

Please see the digital version of the Call for Papers flyer at http://www.esa.int/venice06. The deadline for submitting an abstract for the Symposium is 26 September. The Scientific Committee will review the abstracts and recommend them for oral or poster presentation. Note that you are asked to express your wish for the delivery of your presentation, but from a first estimate of the participation and the time available, not all wishes for oral presentation will be satisfied as expressed. There will be ample poster sessions for fruitful discussions on the progress. Regardless of the presentation format, _all_ contributions shall be submitted as full papers for the proceedings, which we expect to be seminal! Deadline: 7 March 2006. Please do not submit papers on preliminary results but rather a review of your progress over the past (15?) years. Students are encouraged to submit their contribution on recent results and to take advantage of the special registation fee.

An important news since the first announcement in May is that the Second ARGO Science Workshop will take place the same week at the same venue. The Symposium already has a theme on the "Integrated Approach" and specific results from the wide range of research and operational uses of ARGO data and plans for the further exploitation of ARGO will be discussed in the Workshop. The combination of the Symposium with the OSTST meeting, the ARGO workshop and the IDS workshop will allow to foster dialogue among the wide community involved in altimetry and related programmes, engineers, scientists, programme and project managers, as well as end-users.

Please consider your participation in this exceptional event, submit a paper to the Symposium before 26 September and reserve the week from 13 to 18 March 2006 in your agenda. Stay tuned to the Symposium website for future information about registering early. For OSTST, ARGO and IDS meetings, additional information and the call for contributions will be sent out and linked to this website.

Looking forward to your participation in this unique event.

Jérôme Benveniste (ESA) and Yves Ménard (CNES)

Organising Committee Chairs