Categories: GIVE, Validation

by EarthCARE Projektbüro

Categories: GIVE, Validation

by EarthCARE Projektbüro

logo clarinet

CLARINET (CLoud and Aerosol Remote sensing for EarThcare) is now also a part of the big campaign comunity effort ORCHESTRA (Organized Convection and EarthCare Studies over the Tropical Atlantic), which jointly led by the Max-Planck-Institute of Meteorology Hamburg and the DLR Institute of Atmospheric Physics. This will be the eighths sub-campaign in which many other European Institutes and various measuring platforms (e.g. FS METEOR ship, drones, different researchaircrafts such as the German HALO, the Romanian INCAS King Air and French SAFIRE ATR-42) are involved. The overarching goal of the campaign is to better understand the physical mechanisms that organize tropical mesoscale convection and the impact of convective organization on climate and the Earth’s radiation budget.

Since 2021, TROPOS is operating a growing ACTRIS remote sensing facility at the Ocean Science Center Mindelo (OSCM). The station is part of TROPOS‘ ACTRIS-D national facility CVAO (Cabo Verde Atmospheric Observatory) and part of ATMO ACCESS.

So far, the station comprises a complete aerosol and cloud remote sensing set up:

  • A 15-channel multiwavelength Raman polarization lidar of type PollyXT (TROPOS development) for measuring aerosol, cloud and water vapour profiles. polly.tropos.de
  • An AERONET sun-sky-lunar photometer (CIMEL). https://aeronet.gsfc.nasa.gov/
  • A RPG HATRPO G5 microwave radiometer
  • A cloud profiling radar
  • A HALO photonics streamline XR scanning Doppler lidar
  • And a BSRN-like radiation station

In the framework of CLARINET, cloud radar observations will be extended to dual frequency by operating a MIRA 35 Ghz (Metek) and a RPG 94 Ghz cloud radar during August/September 2024.

Furthermore, optimized and tailored operations and data analysis will be conducted to support the other ORCESTRA campaigns and to validate EarthCARE measurements. Additionally, the representativeness of the station in the context of regional heterogeneity of aerosols, clouds, and water vapor will be investigated. This will help contextualize the long-term observations planned for the next 25+ years at OSCM, as well as the intensive operations carried out during ORCESTRA in the summer of 2024.