EGU24-16304, updated on 09 Mar 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-16304
EGU General Assembly 2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

The WInd VElocity Radar Nephoscope (WIVERN): a candidate mission for the ESA Earth Explorer 11

Alessandro Battaglia1, Anthony Illingworth2, Frederic Tridon1, Pavlos Kollias3, Maximilian Maahn4, Cathy Hohenegger5, and Filippo Emilio Scarsi1
Alessandro Battaglia et al.
  • 1politecnico di Torino, DIATI, Turin, Italy (alessandro.battaglia@polito.it)
  • 2Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading, UK
  • 3School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook University, NY, US
  • 4Institute for Meteorology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
  • 5Max Planck Institut for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany

The WIVERN (WInd VElocity Radar Nephoscope, www.wivern.polito.it) concept (Illingworth et al., 2018), is one of the two remaining candidate missions of the ESA Earth Explorer program. The mission is now entering Phase A, which is expected to end in July 2025 with, at the ESA User Consultation Meeting, the final selection of the mission that will be launched in 2032.

WIVERN promises to complement the Aeolus Doppler wind lidar that measures predominantly clear air winds by globally observing, for the first time, the vertical profiles of winds in cloudy areas. The mission will also strengthen the cloud and precipitation observation capability of the Global Observing System by providing unprecedented revisit time of cloud and precipitation vertical profiles.

The mission hinges upon a single instrument, i.e., a dual-polarization Doppler W-band scanning cloud radar with a circular aperture non-deployable main reflector larger than 3 m. The WIVERN antenna conically scans a large swath (of about 800 km) around nadir at an off-nadir angle of about 38o at 12  revolutions per minute. This viewing geometry allows daily revisits poleward of 50°, 20-km horizontal resolution, and approximately 1-km vertical resolution (Battaglia et al., 2022). A key element to achieve Doppler accuracy and large Nyquist folding velocity is the use of closely spaced pulse pairs with polarization diversity (one pulse is H polarised, the other V polarised). In this paper we will discuss the status of the mission including the updated scientific objectives and outline some of the technical challenges of the measuring technique. We will also present examples of Level 2 products with particular focus on the cloud and precipitation products highlighting the benefit of the improved sampling and of the reduced clutter particularly over ocean surfaces compared to nadir-looking radars.

Illingworth, A. J., and Coauthors, 2018: WIVERN: A New Satellite Concept to Provide Global In-Cloud Winds, Precipitation, and Cloud Properties. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 99, 1669–1687, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0047.1. 

Battaglia, A., Martire, P., Caubet, E., Phalippou, L., Stesina, F., Kollias, P., and Illingworth, A.: Observation error analysis for the WInd VElocity Radar Nephoscope W-band Doppler conically scanning spaceborne radar via end-to-end simulations, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 15, 3011–3030, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-15-3011-2022, 2022.

 

How to cite: Battaglia, A., Illingworth, A., Tridon, F., Kollias, P., Maahn, M., Hohenegger, C., and Scarsi, F. E.: The WInd VElocity Radar Nephoscope (WIVERN): a candidate mission for the ESA Earth Explorer 11, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-16304, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-16304, 2024.