News Excerpt:
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) EarthCARE satellite, poised to revolutionize our understanding of how clouds and aerosols affect our climate, has been launched.
- This extraordinary satellite embarked on its journey into space aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, USA.
More about News:
- EarthCARE is a joint mission between the ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
- It was successfully launched, indicating that EarthCARE is safely in orbit around Earth.
- The mission will soon provide crucial information to better understand the complex interactions between clouds, aerosols, and radiation within Earth's atmosphere.
- It is described as ESA's most complex research mission to date.
- JAXA provided the satellite's cloud profiling radar instrument, which is the world's first radar that can measure the velocity of upward and downward flow within clouds.
- While clouds may appear simple, the science behind them is extremely complicated and relatively poorly understood.
Influence of Clouds and Aerosols on Earth's Climate:
- Clouds play an extremely important role in atmospheric heating and cooling, but they remain one of the biggest uncertainties in understanding how the atmosphere drives the climate system and shapes future climate.
- Clouds reflect incoming solar energy back into space, but they also trap outgoing infrared energy, leading to either a net cooling or heating effect on Earth.
- The extent to which clouds warm or cool the Earth depends on various factors such as their shape, location, altitude, water content, and particle size.
- Aerosols are tiny particles like dust and pollutants suspended in the atmosphere.
- It directly impacts the climate system by reflecting and absorbing incoming solar radiation and trapping outgoing radiation.
- It indirectly influences the climate by acting as nuclei for cloud formation.
- Human activities like industrial processes, transportation, and agriculture are significantly altering the concentrations of aerosols in the atmosphere, impacting regional climate patterns.
- The mission carries four state-of-the-art instruments:
- a cloud profiling radar,
- an atmospheric lidar,
- a multispectral imager,
- a broadband radiometer.
Objectives of the EarthCARE Mission:
- These instruments will work together to provide a holistic view of the interplay between clouds, aerosols, and radiation, yielding new insights into Earth's radiation balance.
- The mission comes at a critical time when advancing scientific knowledge is crucial for understanding and acting on climate change.
- Its data is expected to increase the accuracy of global climate models, allowing better predictions of future climate and necessary mitigation measures.
