Observing Facilities Assessment Panel

Twice a year, EOL hosts the Observing Facilities Assessment Panel (OFAP) and coordinates among panel members, PIs, facility providers, EOL staff and NSF to assess the feasibility and cost of NSF-funded field projects (also called "Deployments"). The OFAP is an NCAR-driven community process that provides technical and operational assessment of requests associated with the use of NSF’s Lower Atmospheric Observing Facilities (LAOF) in the field.

The panel, which is composed of a diverse pool of scientists with broad-based experience in observational studies of earth system sciences, meets bi-annually at NCAR to provide valuable feedback and evaluation to facility managers and the user community concerning experiment design, data management issues and the appropriate and efficient use of NSF resources as related to a specific field campaign. The comments and technical evaluation presented by the OFAP, together with feasibility analyses and cost estimates provided by facility managers, are taken into consideration before a final decision is made by individual NSF program officers whether to fund a project.