By Akshit Sangomla
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Josef Aschbacher, director of the Earth Observation Programme at the European Space Agency, talks to Down To Earth about how the Aeolus satellite can improve extreme weather predictions. Excerpt:
How will the data from Aeolus improve our understanding of global wind patterns?
Currently, wind information is either (satellite-based) derived from temperature observations of clouds and is hence low resolution, or is measured directly like through balloon measurements, measurements at the surface (weather stations, buys and scatterometers over the oceans) and by aircraft.
These cover only a few single points on the whole globe or a limited number of altitudes. The World Meteorological Organization has, therefore, identified the lack of direct global wind profile measurements as one of the major deficits in the current Global Observing System.
By filling this gap through its direct and daily measurements, Aeolus will map the global wind patterns from the middle of the stratosphere down to the surface or optically thick clouds. This will improve models describing wind patterns, how they evolve, impact and interact with our environment.
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When will the Aeolus data be available to weather agencies around the world?
Aeolus data is already available to a large number of weather agencies around the world. These agencies are participants to our instrument calibration and validation campaign, which was held at the start of the mission to verify the product quality and optimise it before it can be used operationally in weather forecasts.
When the data quality has been declared fit for direct ingestion into operational weather forecasts, we will let the remaining weather centres, commercial partners and other scientific data users access it. This is expected to happen towards the end of 2019.