The CELLO – Cloud and EarthCARE caL/vaL Observations research project is a Norwegian initiative that uses ground-based and airborne observations to perform calibration and validation (cal/val) to quantify the quality of ESA’s/JAXA’s EarthCARE (Cloud, Aerosol, and Radiation Explorer) satellite. The EarthCARE satellite (launched in May 2024) offers the unique and powerful collocation of an atmospheric lidar, cloud profiling radar, multi-spectral imager and broadband radiometer to provide unprecedented data sets to advance our understanding of the role of clouds in the climate system.
To fulfill EarthCARE’s mission objectives, cal/val efforts are of paramount importance to characterize and quality-check its cloud and aerosol products. With the two field campaigns in CELLO we get observations used for quality-check the satellite data.
The CELLO consortium consists of the University of Oslo, Andøya Space AS (Andenes, Norway), and the National Institute for Aerospace Research “Elie Carafoli” (INCAS, Romania). While Andøya Space AS is responsible for the ground-based efforts, validating aerosol products of EarthCARE with the tropospheric lidar and Cimel sun/lunar photometer on ALOMAR, our team from the University of Oslo is leading the airborne component of the project, conducting in-situ flights with the Romanian INCAS King Air research aircraft.
The overall objectives of the CELLO airborne campaigns are:
- Provide in-situ calibration and validation (cal/val) data for the EarthCARE mission scientists and product development team in a range of cloudy environments and temperature regimes.
- Collocate the EarthCARE correlative observations with overflights of ground-based remote sensing sites whenever possible.
The two CELLO in-situ field campaigns are:
Get more campaign information and details on GITHUB:
