GIVE

GIVE - German Initiative for the Validation of EarthCARE

General project description

Launched on 28 May 2024, the EarthCARE satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) represents a milestone of spaceborne Earth observation. EarthCARE’s payload consists of two active instruments – the ATmospheric LIDar (ATLID) and the Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR) – and two passive instruments – the MultiSpectral Imager (MSI) and the Broad-Band Radiometer (BBR). With this special design and a synergistic approach of combining the products of two or more instruments, it is possible for the first time to obtain complex global measurements of atmospheric aerosol, clouds and radiation. The new knowledge will importantly contribute to reducing the large uncertainty of aerosol, clouds and aerosol-cloud-interactions in climate models. To ensure a high quality of the EarthCARE measurements and datasets, intense calibration and validation efforts concerning the single instruments and the synergistic products are required.

For this purpose, the German Initiative for the Validation of EarthCARE (GIVE) was founded. The project will last from January 2024 to December 2026 and includes several German research institutes, which are the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS), the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), the University of Cologne (UzK), the German Weather Service (DWD), the Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ), the University of Hamburg (UHH) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU). With ground-based, airborne and spaceborne observations, reference measurements are collected and used to validate the EarthCARE measurements.

Contribution of TROPOS

Within the GIVE project, TROPOS is responsible for the coordination of the validation activities and of the validation of ATLID, MSI and the synergistic ATLID-MSI products. While the validation of the MSI cloud products is based on the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) and the Flexible Combined Imager (FCI) of the geostationary satellites Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) and Meteosat Third Generation (MTG), respectively, ground-based lidar observations from permanent and mobile stations within PollyNET, e.g., Mindelo (Cabo Verde), Leipzig (Germany), Melpitz (Germany), Dushanbe (Dushanbe) or LACROS (mobile station), are used as reference for the ATLID products. With the full supersites, e.g., at Mindelo and LACROS, the validation of synergistic two or more sensor products is possible. TROPOS also ensures the delivery of near real time lidar and sun photometer data from the PollyNET stations to the ESA Atmospheric Validation Data Centre (EVDC) via ACTRIS. In addition, with the site at Mindelo, TROPOS actively participated in the CLoud and Aerosol Remote sensing for EarThcare (CLARINET) sub-campaign of the Organized Convection and EarthCARE Studies over the TRopical Atlantic (ORCESTRA) campaign, which took place around Cabo Verde in summer 2024.