EUMETSAT plans for cloud and aerosol products from the next generation geostationary and polar orbiting satellites

Résumé fourni par la source

Satellite observations of cloud properties are of critical importance for a number of established, operational, and emerging applications serving a wide user community. Examples include the support to nowcasting activities in National Weather Services for the anticipation of evolving severe storms, icing risk evaluation for air traffic, estimation of surface radiation for photovoltaic systems. Numerical Weather Prediction Models (NWP), whilst generally not directly assimilating cloud products, use them for model evaluation and, in the context of climate change, Thematic Climate Data Records from level-2 products can support Climate Analysis. Cloud products are also direct inputs to several level-2 retrievals such as Atmospheric Motion Vectors (AMV), for which quality cloudy pixel identification and height assessment are crucial for their use in NWP. Similarly, satellite observations of aerosol properties provide support to regulatory and legislative activities in Member States to support air quality monitoring and climate products, particularly in case of dust storms or volcanic ash events. The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) facilitates the use of the data for this purpose and has a need for high quality near-real time operational aerosol products for use in data assimilation. High quality aerosol products are becoming increasingly important for NWP and climate modelling due to the influence of aerosols on the radiation budget and their role in cloud processes and precipitation. The potential for EUMETSAT to provide state of the art cloud products will significantly increase with the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) and the EUMETSAT Polar System programme Second Generation (EPS-SG) and with the possibility of deriving cloud properties from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 instruments. Improvements include higher spatial resolution and richer spectral coverage, which together will allow more accurate cloud detection, estimation of the cloud phase, layering, altitude and spatial inhomogeneity, at the same time maintaining continuity with the legacy products based on current instruments. Moreover, EUMETSAT, as the only European agency providing aerosol products for near real time services, will significantly benefit from the new suite of instruments, such as dedicated aerosol polarimeter (3MI), the Multi Angle Polarimeter (MAP) from the Copernicus CO2M mission and from synergy between sensors. These new sensors will allow the exploration of the new information from multi-angle, multi-spectral polarimetric observations together with other instrument classes, to improve estimates of the aerosol optical depth, aerosol type, optical characteristics and layer height. The talk will provide an overview of the activities within EUMETSAT to prepare for the challenges and opportunities offered by the new imagers and spectrometers on board of the upcoming geostationary and polar orbiting missions, will outline the potential for development of multi-instrument synergistic products, and discuss the plans for calibration and validation of level-2 products against surface and satellite-borne reference datasets.

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