Wind Profile Satellite Observation Requirements and Capabilities

Ad Stoffelen,Anne Grete Straume,Michael Rennie,Oliver Reitebuch,Erland Källén,Michael Vaughan,Heiner Körnich,Harald Schyberg,Mike Hardesty,Lars-Peter Riishøjgaard,Pierre Flamant,Régis Borde,Lars Isaksen,Angela Benedetti,Tsengdar Lee,Mary Forsythe,Alain Dabas

doi:10.1175/bams-d-18-0202.1

Abstract

Abstract The Aeolus mission objectives are to improve numerical weather prediction (NWP) and enhance the understanding and modeling of atmospheric dynamics on global and regional scale. Given the first successes of Aeolus in NWP, it is time to look forward to future vertical wind profiling capability to fulfill the rolling requirements in operational meteorology. Requirements for wind profiles and information on vertical wind shear are constantly evolving. The need for high-quality wind and profile information to capture and initialize small-amplitude, fast-evolving, and mesoscale dynamical structures increases, as the resolution of global NWP improved well into the 3D turbulence regime on horizontal scales smaller than 500 km. In addition, advanced requirements to describe the transport and dispersion of atmospheric constituents and better depict the circulation on climate scales are well recognized. Direct wind profile observations over the oceans, tropics, and Southern Hemisphere are not provided by the current global observing system. Looking to the future, most other wind observation techniques rely on cloud or regions of water vapor and are necessarily restricted in coverage. Therefore, after its full demonstration, an operational Aeolus-like follow-on mission obtaining globally distributed wind profiles in clear air by exploiting molecular scattering remains unique.

Highlights

The Aeolus mission objectives are to improve numerical weather prediction (NWP) and enhance the understanding and modeling of atmospheric dynamics on global and regional scale
Several sources for scientific requirements exist and without being exhaustive, we address the ESA Living Planet Programme (LPP), the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Grand Challenges, scientific requirements related to Copernicus Climate Change and Atmosphere Monitoring Services and scientific issues in atmospheric dynamics
The ESA Aeolus mission included the launch of the first DWL to space in August 2018, following a well-expressed need for wind profile observations to initialize numerical weather prediction (NWP) models

Summary

Introduction

The Aeolus mission objectives are to improve numerical weather prediction (NWP) and enhance the understanding and modeling of atmospheric dynamics on global and regional scale. Given the first successes of Aeolus in NWP, it is time to look forward to future vertical wind profiling capability to fulfill the rolling requirements in operational meteorology. The need for high-quality wind and profile information to capture and initialize small-amplitude, fast-evolving, and mesoscale dynamical structures increases, as the resolution of global NWP improved well into the 3D turbulence regime on horizontal scales smaller than 500 km. Vertical and horizontal wind shear structure in the equatorial region is poorly modeled, where more observations would be helpful for a better sampling of the tropical dynamics and circulation (Houchi et al 2010; Lin et al 2016). A recent WMO workshop on the impact of various observing systems on numerical weather prediction (NWP) recommended enhanced profiling capability in the Arctic (Sato and Riishojgaard 2016)

Methods

Findings

Conclusion