Leicester scientists contribute to latest EarthCARE climate satellite mission | News

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is due to launch tonight at 23.20 BST (15.20 PDT in California), carrying a major Earth Explorer satellite, EarthCARE (Earth Clouds, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer), a joint mission between the ESA (European Space Agency) and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency). The UK is a major partner in ESA, supporting 15 years of world-leading research through the NCEO (National Center for Earth Observation) at the Universities of Leicester, Reading, Oxford and Imperial College.

EarthCARE will revolutionize our understanding of how clouds and aerosol particles affect weather and climate, helping to resolve disagreements between projections of future climate. Atmospheric aerosols are suspended particles, such as smoke and dust, that are the seeds from which clouds grow. When traffic or industry release aerosols, they can change the brightness of clouds and the likelihood that they will rain. EarthCARE tools are designed to identify the mechanisms driving these changes.

EarthCARE will also be tested for its ability to improve our weather forecasts, which, if successful, will lead to future EarthCARE instruments being flown as part of the operational forecasting tools. This is significant for people in the UK, as sectors such as transport and agriculture depend on knowledge of, for example, intense winter storms that bring flooding.

First proposed in 1993, this €800 million satellite is the most complex Earth Explorer mission to date. 23 UK organizations have been involved in the design and development of the satellite over the past 30 years. The satellite brings together four types of measurements on a single platform for the first time. The tools are; The Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR), built in Japan, reflects radio waves off cloud droplets to determine their location and falling speed. Atmospheric lidar (ATLID) does the same for aerosols using an ultraviolet laser. Two important instruments were built by UK companies. The Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI) photographs the area around the radar beam, while the Broadband Radiometer (BBR) measures the total energy leaving Earth. The combination of the four instruments will monitor every step in sunlight traveling through the air, determining the energy balance between the surface and the atmosphere.

Working with colleagues around the world, NCEO staff at the University of Leicester have developed a more realistic way of calculating in-cloud signals seen by radar and devised new mathematical algorithms that provide vertical profiles of airfoil fall velocity. For the first time, scientists will be able to observe from space the speed at which particles fall through clouds and precipitate to the surface. This is fundamental to find out if we have rain or hail or snow and how much.

More recently, Dr Kamil Mroz of the University of Leicester has developed a world-leading method to add knowledge of the total water in cloud particles and their characteristic size to the fall velocity. Understanding this process is crucial to understanding the life cycle of clouds, including how rain forms, intensifies, and dissipates during storms.

Professor John Remedios, Director of NCEO and expert in atmospheric science at the University of Leicester commented:

“The launch of Earthcare, with its sophisticated scientific payload, is a major milestone after many years of demonstrating the technology. We are very excited to be able to look inside the clouds and observe the movement and growth of the droplets, whether they fall directly down or rise in the updrafts that fuel the intensity of storms. Modeling these processes will give us new insights into how storms grow, influence and respond to climate change, and how we can harness this knowledge to improve weather predictability.

“In the UK, we see that rain plays a fundamental role in our working lives, in our homes and in our leisure time. This mission enables our world-leading scientists to make a difference at home and around the world. We will work closely with weather forecasting agencies such as the Met Office and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (in Reading) to do this.”