Background on Aeolus

ADM-Aeolus is the second of ESA’s Earth Explorer core missions. The objective is to provide profiles of high-quality wind observations from the surface to 30 km, using a Doppler wind lidar (DWL) instrument in a near-polar sun-synchronous, dawn-dusk orbit. The wind information is the horizontal line-of-sight component, perpendicular to the satellite track. The mission is intended to have a minimum lifetime of three years.
ECMWF is leading the project to develop Aeolus Level 2B/C processing software, that is, wind retrieval and data assimilation of Aeolus winds, and to implement the processing within ECMWF as part of the mission ground segment. The L2B wind retrieval algorithms have been developed in collaboration with KNMI, Météo-France, DLR and LMD/IPSL.  Aeolus also provides information on cloud and aerosol optical properties (the L2A product).  ECMWF has also contributed to a number of data impact studies to assess the potential of the Aeolus data. We expect the Aeolus mission to have a positive impact on forecast and analysis quality, in particular for the tropical winds.

The L2B processing software

ECMWF and KNMI are responsible for the development of the ADM-Aeolus wind retrieval software (the Level-2B processor) which produces winds suitable for use in NWP and meteorological research.  The algorithms were desribed in Tan et al. (2008), however there have been many changes since then.

• The ADM-Aeolus Level-2B/C processing documentation (including the Software Release Note, the Algorithm Theoretical Baseline and the IODD) and associated datasets (useful for installation testing) can be freely downloaded from here
• The source code can be obtained from here (upon acceptance of the licence terms)
• Any news on updates to the software will be provided here