EarthCARE
end-to-end simulator

The Earth Clouds and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) proposal is a joint initiative between the European Space Agency (ESA) and two Japanese agencies, namely the Japanese Aerospace exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japanese National Institute of Communications Technology (NICT). EarthCARE is a unique proposal aimed at improving our understanding of the interaction between Clouds and Solar and Thermal radiation within the Earths atmosphere. The EarthCARE platform will carry a combination of active (cloud radar and lidar) and passive instruments for cloud/aerosol and radiation remote sensing. The combination of the active and passive sensor on one platform is a unique feature of EarthCARE and will enable the mission to probe the vertical structure of the atmosphere and relate the observed structure to the top of atmosphere radiances and fluxes. By doing so, EarthCARE will provide observations critical for the accurate modeling of 3-D radiation field. The unique combinations of co-located sensors will also enable new and exciting cloud/aerosol related process studies to be carried out.

The instruments being considered for the EarthCARE platform are:

• An advanced lidar (ATLID).
• A Cloud profiling Radar (CPR).
• A Multi-spectral Imager (MSI).
• A Broad-Band Radiometer (BBR).

In order to develop retrieval algorithms and in order to investigate various instrumental tradeoff issues it is necessary to simulate the mission. In order to be useful the simulations of the different instruments must be consistent with each other. As well it is desirable to be able to consider cases ranging from idealized `simple' scenes to complex realistic scenes based on the output of cloud-resolving models. The EarthCARE simulator represents a unified approach to simulating the mission which satisfies these requirements.

The EarthCARE simulator is capable of performing high quality simulations of CloudSat/CALIPSO soundings of cloudy atmospheres. Additionally, the package is currently being extended in order to be able to perform ground-based lidar and cloud radar simulations. A simulation capability for precipitation radars and microwave radiometers are also envisioned.

The current release version of the EarthCARE can be found at,

ftp://bbc.knmi.nl
username: simguest
password: S139st

The directory contains the users guide: Sim_ug.pdf as well as the distribution files. The files install.txt and install_win.txt explain the installation procedure.