Aeolus - Status of ESA's Doppler Wind Lidar Mission

The European Space Agency (ESA)'s wind mission, Aeolus, was launched on 22 August 2018. Aeolus carries a single instrument, the Atmospheric Laser Doppler Instrument Aladin, which is a high spectral resolution Doppler wind lidar operated at 355 nm. Aladin is the first Doppler wind lidar in space, and is a member of the ESA Earth Explorer family, to demonstrate the potential of Doppler wind lidars in space for improving weather forecasting and the understanding of atmospheric dynamics and its role in climate variability. Aeolus provides profiles of single line-of-sight winds (primary product) in near-real-time (NRT), and profiles of atmospheric backscatter and extinction (spin-off product), to directly improve weather forecasting and air quality modelling and furthermore the understanding of atmospheric physics and climate through associated scientific studies. The instrument samples the atmosphere from about 30 km down to the Earth's surface, or down to optically thick clouds. The required precision of the wind observations is 1-3 m/s in the troposphere and 3-5 m/s in the stratosphere. The systematic error requirement is 0.7 m/s. The mission spin-off product includes information about aerosol and cloud layers. The satellite flies in a polar dusk/dawn orbit (6 am/pm local time), providing ~16 orbits per 24 hours with an orbit repeat cycle of 7 days.

The status of the Aeolus mission will be presented, including its performance assessment, ongoing and planned operations and exploitation. This comprises the outcome of the instrument commissioning and the first 10 months of the following operations, calibration and validation activities, as well as findings from the data quality assurance framework. Plans and first results from international Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) impact activities will be presented along upcoming scientific exploitation studies.