The international science community is invited to participate in the EarthCARE Science and Validation Workshop, which is jointly organized by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the German EarthCARE Project Office at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and the European Space Agency (ESA), in cooperation with our partners, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT).
The EarthCARE Mission
The Earth Cloud, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) will provide three-dimensional profiles of clouds and aerosols collocated with observations of reflected solar and emitted thermal radiation in order to quantify the impact of clouds and aerosols on radiation. The mission is being implemented, in cooperation with JAXA and NICT, as the sixth ESA Earth Explorer Mission, with a target launch date in 2019.
The satellite employs four instruments. A lidar, operating at a wavelength of 355 nm and equipped with a high spectral resolution receiver and a depolarisation channel will provide vertical profiles of clouds and aerosols at nadir. A cloud radar with Doppler capability, operating at 94 GHz, will measure vertical cloud profiles, vertical motion of clouds and precipitation. An imager with channels in the visible, near-/short-wave/thermal infrared will provide across-track scene context information and enable the reconstruction of three-dimensional cloud and aerosol scenes. Radiative transfer calculations will be used to calculate atmospheric heating rates as well as top-of-atmosphere broad-band radiances and fluxes. The latter will be compared against the observations of the fourth EarthCARE instrument, a broad-band radiometer with a total solar and total thermal channel and three instantaneous viewing directions: forward, nadir, and backward.
The mission ground segments of ESA and JAXA will provide science data to the community, including a wide range of geophysical parameters related to clouds, aerosols and radiation, with an emphasis on the retrievals fully exploiting the synergy of the four instruments.
The Workshop
The workshop will provide the forum for the discussion of the preparation of the mission exploitation and its product validation. It combines the Seventh International EarthCARE Science Workshop – following the sixth workshop held in 2014 in Tokyo – and the First ESA EarthCARE Validation Workshop, following ESA’s Announcement of Opportunity for submitting proposals for the calibration and validation of EarthCARE, to organize the activities of the Principal. The workshops will be arranged side-by-side in respective morning and evening sessions during the identified week.
