Airborne direct-detection and coherent wind lidar measurements over the North Atlantic in 2015 supporting ESA’s aeolus mission

¹ DLR, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany
² Simpson Weather Associates SWA, Charlottesville, USA
³ NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, USA
⁴ NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, USA
⁵ University of Leeds, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Leeds, United Kingdom
⁶ ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands

^* uwe.marksteiner@dlr.de

Published online: 13 April 2018

Abstract

The launch of the Aeolus mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) is planned for 2018. The satellite will carry the first wind lidar in space, ALADIN (Atmospheric Laser Doppler INstrument). Its prototype instrument, the ALADIN Airborne Demonstrator (A2D), was deployed during several airborne campaigns aiming at the validation of the measurement principle and optimization of algorithms. In 2015, flights of two aircraft from DLR & NASA provided the chance to compare parallel wind measurements from four airborne wind lidars for the first time.