Appropriations are one part of a complex federal budget process that includes budget resolutions, appropriations (regular, supplemental, and continuing) bills, rescissions, and budget reconciliation bills. This report is a guide to one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress passes each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Legislative Branch Appropriations.

The Waste Information Requirements Document (WIRD) has the following purposes: To describe the overall drivers that require characterization information and to document their source; To define how characterization is going to satisfy the drivers, close issues, and measure and report progress; and To describe deliverables and acceptance criteria for characterization. Characterization information is required to maintain regulatory compliance, perform operations and maintenance, resolve safety issues, and prepare for disposal of waste. Commitments addressing these requirements are derived from the Hanford Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order, also known as the Tri-Party Agreement; the Recommendation 93-5 Implementation Plan (DOE-RL 1996a) to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB); and other requirement sources listed in Section 2.0. The Waste Information Requirements Document replaces the tank waste analysis plans and the tank characterization plan previously required by the Tri-Party Agreement, Milestone M-44-01 and M-44-02 series.

Previously, the proposers have delivered to ARM a documented algorithm, that is now applied operationally, and which derives water vapor profiles from combined remote sensor measurements of water vapor radiometers, cloud-base ceilometers, and radio acoustic sounding systems (RASS). With the expanded deployment of a Raman lidar at the CART Central Facility, high quality, high vertical-resolution, water vapor profiles will be provided during nighttime clear conditions, and during clear daytime conditions, to somewhat lower altitudes. The object of this effort is to use Kalman Filtering, previously applied to the combination of nighttime Raman lidar and microwave radiometer data, to derive high-quality water vapor profiles, during non-precipitating conditions, from data routinely available at the CART site. Input data to the algorithm would include: Raman lidar data, highly quality-controlled data of integrated moisture from microwave radiometers and GPS, RASS, and radiosondes. While analyzing data obtained during the Water Vapor Intensive Operating Period'97 at the SGP CART site in central Oklahoma, several questions arose about the calibration of the ARM microwave radiometers (MWR). A large portion of this years effort was a thorough analysis of the many factors that are important for the calibration of this instrument through the tip calibration method and the …