Welcome to the CALIPSO-CloudSat Ten-Year Progress Assessment and Path Forward Workshop
Objective
Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the CALIPSO and CloudSat operation in Space, the objectives of this workshop are to:
- Highlight and assess some of the most important results obtained from CALIPSO and CloudSat over the nearly achieved 10-year record.
- Address the benefits of CALIPSO and Cloudsat synergism within the A-Train in the frame of an international partnership.
- Identify remaining gaps and needs for future missions.
History
The CALIPSO and CloudSat space missions were proposed to complement the NASA Earth Observation mission AQUA in 1998 to improve our understanding of the role of aerosols and clouds in the Earth’s climate system. Both missions now fill a crucial, well-recognized need for high-resolution atmospheric profiling, and have proved essential in providing reference observations useful in reducing the uncertainties that limit our understanding of the global climate system.
Partnership
The CALIPSO mission is a pioneering international partnership between NASA and the French Space Agency, CNES. CALIPSO was launched on 28 April 2006, in a dual launch with NASA mission CloudSat. These 3-year nominal missions are now reaching 10 years of operation. Data from the three CALIPSO instruments (CALIOP, IIR and WFC) and from the CloudSat radar (CPR) have been collected almost continuously and instruments have performed exceptionally since launch.
Mission Breakthroughs
Collocated measurements from CALIPSO and CloudSat have led to significant advances in cloud retrievals by other A-Train instruments, through the development of robust retrieval techniques. Vertical profile measurements of clouds, aerosols and combined products now provide a unique resource for evaluating observationally-based estimates of all-sky direct radiative effects of aerosols and clouds, as well as a reference for air quality models, models used to forecast volcanic plume dispersion, weather forecast and climate models.
