AOS Inclined Time-Varying Observations of Aerosols, Clouds, Convection, and Precipitation

[13-Dec-2022]
Abstract: Atmospheric aerosols, clouds, and convection strongly influence the air we breathe, and the water we drink, and the radiation budget of our planet. Convective storms, which are prevalent in the tropics and mid-latitudes, produce rainfall critical to the Earth's water cycle, cause severe weather that negatively affect society, and generate high clouds that impact the Earth's radiation budget. Atmospheric aerosols, such as desert dust, smoke from wildfires, and anthropogenic pollutants can cause poor air quality when they are near the surface and/or transported long-range. Clouds and precipitation associated with convection, as well as aerosol emissions, have strong diurnal emission characteristics and small-scale processes that control their spatiotemporal variability. The diurnal variability and processes that affect convection, high cloud generation, and aerosol emissions are complex and not well understood, principally because we have no diurnally resolved space-borne measurements of critical processes, like those determined by vertical motion.
NASA has established the new Earth System Observatory (ESO) to fulfill the science needs presented in the 2017 Earth Science Decadal Survey. As part of ESO, the Atmosphere Observing System (AOS) focuses on aerosols, clouds, convection, and precipitation. While the AOS architecture consists of sensors in two orbit planes, this presentation will describe the inclined orbit project. The AOS inclined (AOS-I) project includes a backscatter lidar (532 and 1064 nm), a Ku-band Doppler radar, and two microwave radiometers that provide time delta measurements. The nominal orbit is a 55-degree inclination angle and 407 km altitude, with a planned launch no earlier than July 2028. The AOS inclined (AOS-I) project provides near simultaneous collocated observations of the vertical motions, clouds, and aerosols, that will reveal, for the first time, convective and aerosol processes under different phases of the diurnal forcing and thus shed light on one of the most fundamental modes of variability of the climate system.