Page History

Welcome to the EarthCARE ESA Validation Portal.

This part of the EarthCARE validation website serves as introductory information for scientists interested in EarthCARE validation, and also acts as a landing page for the (restricted)  collaboration environment for the Principal Investigators of the ESA EarthCARE Validation Team. Scientists that are interested to collaborate on EarthCARE Validation are requested to contact esa-ecvt@earthcare.esa.int in order to obtain information on how to join the EarthCARE Validation Team.

Introduction to the EarthCARE mission 

EarthCARE will measure the 3D structure of cloud and aerosols, together with collocated observations of solar (shortwave) and terrestrial (thermal) radiation. For this purpose, the satellite carries four scientific instruments, two active instruments – a lidar and a radar – to measure the vertical distribution of clouds and aerosols, an imager  to collect cloud and aerosol information across the satellite ground track and a broadband radiometer for measuring outgoing reflected solar and emitted thermal at the top of the atmosphere. 

News

 , ESA’s Clouds, Aerosols and Radiation Explorer mission developed in co-operation with JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, will address the need for a better understanding of the interactions between cloud, radiative and aerosol processes that play a role in climate regulation. That ESA-JAXA Joint mission was selected as the 6th Earth Explorer Mission and 3rd ESA Earth Observation Core Mission during the Granada ESA meeting in October 2004.

The EarthCARE mission aims to improve the representation and understanding of the Earth's radiative balance in climate and numerical weather forecast models by acquiring vertical profiles of clouds and aerosols, as well as the radiances at the top of the atmosphere. Aerosols control cloud properties, while clouds control the production of precipitation and convection influences stratospheric humidity. The observations of EarthCARE will therefore lead to more reliable climate predictions and better weather forecasts through the improved representation of processes involving clouds, aerosol and radiation.

The satellite will weigh about 2350 kilograms (including propellant) and will be placed in a quasi-polar orbit of 97° inclination at an altitude of about 400 kilometres.  EarthCARE has been launched on a Falcon 9 on 28 May 2024. The four instruments of the payload consist of an Atmospheric Lidar, a Broad-Band Radiometer and a Multi-Spectral Imager developed by ESA, and a Cloud Profiling Radar developed by JAXA. This instrument suite has been optimised to provide co-located samples of the state of the atmosphere along the satellite flight track.

News

• EarthCARE has been launched on 28 May 2024 
• The EarthCARE validation is in full swing, with thus far (status 18 Oct 2024 )  43 underflights of 33 EarthCARE orbits by 7 aircraft involved in 6 campaigns with payloads including 5 lidars, 3 imagers, 1 polarimeter, 3 radars, and 4 different in-situ sampling suites, complemented by several networks of ground instruments and monitoring by ingestion assimilation models. Please refer to the validation plan and join the three EarthCARE workshops this year and the Living Planet symposium. The EarthCARE launch date has been set to July 2022. Further news on the mission status can be found here (Mission Status)

EarthCARE Mission resources

Further information about the EarthCARE mission in general can be obtained from the following resources:Websites

• The ESA EarthCARE website at https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/The_Living_Planet_Programme/Earth_Explorers/EarthCARE
• The ESA Earthnet portal at https://earth.esa.int/web/guest/missions/esa-future-missions/earthcare
• The EarthCARE site at the EOportal https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/e/earthcare
• The JAXA EarthCARE website at  https://global.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/earthcare/

• A scientific paper about the EarthCARE Mission in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

Documents

• The EarthCARE Mission Requirements Document 
• The EarthCARE System Requirements DocumentThe

EarthCARE

EarthCARE Validation

The geophysical validation of EarthCARE involves a suite of correlative instruments and methods. This portal provides an overview of the validation activities  and support functions for the validation teams. The contributions . These activities are resulting from the responses to the 2017 ESA Announcement of Opportunity (AO) for the Validation of EarthCARE. 

The contributions activities have been presented and reviewed during the 1st ESA EarthCARE Validation Workshop in June 2018 in Bonn, Germany. 

The scientists in the EarthCARE validation team will collaborate with ESA algorithm and instrument experts and will be provided with preliminary EarthCARE data products as soon as available, hence well before public release of the consolidated data products.

EarthCARE Validation Resources

Websites

• A Summary of Contributions to activities in the ESA EarthCARE Validation Programme
• The (restricted) portal for the ESA EarthCARE Validation Team Principal Investigators (in preparation)
• The ESA Atmospheric Validation Data Centre (EVDC)

Documents

• The EEarthCARE Scientific Validation Implementation Plan (in preparation) Plan (2.0)
• The reference documents of the EarthCARE Validation Announcement of Opportunity (the proposal submission function is now closeddeactivated, but you can still contact esa-ecvt@earthcare.esa.int in case you are interested in collaboration)
• The report of the 1st ESA EarthCARE Validation Workshop held in June 2018 in Bonn, GermanyEarthCARE product list v6

Meetings/Workshops

Date	Venue	Title (link to workshop home page and presentations)	Report
13-15 June 2018	Bonn, Germany	1st ESA EarthCARE Validation Workshop	20180613-15 ESA CalVal Workshop Report_(

2018)

Tools

Note that several additional meetings may be organised by validation subgroups and are not listed here.