System definition of the ESA Earth Explorer EarthCARE mission

Abstract

EarthCARE is one of the candidates for the future ESA Earth Explorer Core Missions. The mission major objective is to determine, in a radiatively consistent manner, the global distribution of vertical profiles of cloud and aerosol field characteristics. A major innovation of the EarthCARE mission is to include both active and passive instruments together on a single platform, which allows a complete 3-D spatial and temporal picture to be developed of the radiative flux field at the top of the atmosphere and the Earth's surface. While the active instruments provide vertical cloud profiles, the passive instruments (mainly the multi-spectral imager) provide supplementary horizontal data to allow extrapolation of the 3-D cloud and aerosol characteristics. The EarthCARE payload is composed of five instruments: an Atmospheric Lidar, a Cloud Profiling Radar, a Fourier Transform Spectrometer, a Multi-Spectral Imager and a Broad Band Radiometer. The mission baseline is a sun synchronous orbit with 10.30 descending node crossing time and an altitude around 400 km. EarthCARE is an ESA mission proposed in collaboration with NASDA.