On May 29, a defunct Falcon 9 took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California carrying a brand-new type of satellite: EarthCARE, for Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer. Born from a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and its Japanese counterpart JAXA, the probe took to the air to study the impact of clouds and aerosols on climate change. As global temperatures rise, understanding and monitoring the radiation budget is crucial to studying and solving climate-related problems.
A snapshot of the energy balance on Earth.
Little by little, scientists are receiving the first data from the various instruments. This week was the first image produced by the Broadband Radiometer, one of the four instruments on board the spacecraft. According to ESA, this image captures the Earth's energy balance, that is, the amount of energy the planet absorbs thanks to solar radiation and the amount of thermal radiation that the Earth then emits into space.
“Of course, we never doubted the potential of the EarthCARE broadband radiometer, but here we see, at this early stage of the mission, that the instrument is performing very well and providing excellent data,” Simonetta Celli, director, is excited. ESA Earth Observation Programmes. “Each of the satellite’s different instruments has a very important role to play. When everything is working in harmony and the satellite is out of service, the scientific community and meteorologists will have a powerful tool to advance our understanding of Earth’s energy balance, advance climate science and improve weather forecasting.”
3D monitoring
The first instrument to be operational, the Broadband Radiometer, measures radiation fluxes at the top of Earth’s atmosphere more precisely. As the satellite moves in its orbit, the instrument observes the atmosphere from three directions simultaneously. The first angle is directly below the satellite. The second is in front of the satellite’s path (forward). The third is behind the satellite’s path (backward). A fundamental way to take systematic, three-dimensional views of reflected and emitted radiation, allowing scientists to accurately measure simultaneously how much solar energy is reflected back into space and how much heat energy is emitted from Earth’s surface.
This combination of viewing angles is a primary asset to the instrument since a single view will not fully reveal sunlight or heat radiation reflected or emitted by clouds and other elements.
There are two checks that have not sent their data yet.
15 days ago, the cloud profiling radar sent back its first data. On the left of the image (above), the data reveal the vertical concentration of cloud particles measured by radar reflectivity. We can see that the densest part of the cloud is at its center.
On the right, the upper layer contains ice crystals and snowflakes suspended in the atmosphere with little vertical motion. Both images show a clear boundary at about 5 km altitude, where ice and snow in the upper layer melt, forming water droplets that fall as rain.
Scientists are now awaiting the first data from the Atmospheric LiDAR and Multispectral Imaging instrument.
