Aeolus calibration, validation and science campaigns

• Main Authors: Fehr, Thorsten, Amiridis, Vassilis, Bley, Sebastian, Cocquerez, Philippe, Lemmerz, Christian, Močnik, Griša, Skofronick-Jackson, Gail, Straume, Anne Grete
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Aeolus satellite; ALADIN; aerosol; validation; info:eu-repo/classification/udc/502.3/.7; Aeolus; Arctic; Iceland; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://repozitorij.ung.si/IzpisGradiva.php?id=7546; http://repozitorij.ung.si/Dokument.php?id=24663&dn=; https://plus.cobiss.net/cobiss/si/sl/bib/118842627

Since 2007, a series of ESA supported airborne campaigns have been essential to the development of the Aeolus Doppler Wind Lidar satellite mission, which was successfully launched on 22 September 2018 and is providing a novel wind and aerosol profile data. A core element of the Aeolus Cal/Val activities is DLR’s A2D wind lidar on-board the DLR Falcon aircraft, an airborne demonstrator for the Aeolus ALADIN satellite instrument flown in combination with the 2-µm Doppler Wind Lidar reference system. Following the pre-launch WindVal-I and –II campaigns in 2015 and 2016, a number of calibration and validation campaigns have been successfully implemented: WindVal-III providing early Cal/Val results in November 2018 only three months after the Aeolus launch, AVATAR-E in May 2019 focussing on the Cal/Val over Central Europe, and AVATAR-I in September 2019 providing Cal/Val information in the North Atlantic and Arctic flying from Iceland. The airborne validation is also being supported through balloon flights in the tropical UTLS and lower stratosphere in the frame of the CNES Stratéole-2 stratospheric balloon activities. In the frame of the ESA supported pre-Stratéole-2 campaign, eight stratospheric balloons have been launched from the Seychelles in November/December 2019 providing unique upper level wind data for the Aeolus validation. The largest impact of the Aeolus observations is expected in the Tropics, and in particular over the Tropical oceans, where only a limited number of wind profile information is provided by ground based observations. Aeolus provides key direct measurements which are of importance to correctly constrain the wind fields in models. In addition, Aeolus observations have the potential to further enhance our current knowledge on aerosols and clouds by globally providing optical properties products that include atmospheric backscatter and extinction coefficient profiles, lidar ratio profiles and scene classification. In the tropics, a particularly interesting case is the outflow of Saharan dust ...