The ESA-JAXA EarthCARE Clouds, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer Mission: Overview and Development Status

摘要

The EarthCARE, Earth Clouds, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer, is a joint European-Japanese mission (ESA/JAXA/NICT) which has been defined with the objective of improving the understanding of cloud-aerosol-radiation interactions so as to include them correctly and reliably in climate and numerical weather prediction models. The EarthCARE Mission has been approved for implementation as ESA's third Earth Explorer Core Mission. It is currently in its Detailed Design Phase (phase C/D) with a launch scheduled for 2018. This paper presents the EarthCARE programmatic status, the current instrument design and mission performance. The mission end-to-end simulator (E3SIM) and data processing up to level 2 (geophysical products) and related science activities will be discussed. The E3SIM supports end-to-end simulations from a scene definition to synergistic level 2 products. Level 2 retrieval algorithms can be tested in the full chain (provision of input data, algorithm performance tests by comparison of outputs with known inputs) by using a single framework with well-defined interfaces helping to harmonise algorithm developments.