The EarthCARE lidar cloud and aerosol profile processor (A-PRO): the A-AER, A-EBD, A-TC and A-ICE products.

ATLID (“ATmospheric LIDar”) is the lidar to be flown on the multi-instrument Earth Clouds and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE). EarthCARE is a joint ESA/JAXA mission now scheduled for launch in 2024. ATLID is a 3 channel linearly polarized High-Spectral Resolution (HSRL) system operating at 355 nm. Cloud and aerosol optical properties are key EarthCARE products. This paper will provide an overview of the ATLID L2a (i.e. single instrument) retrieval algorithms being developed and implemented in order to derive cloud and aerosol optical properties. The L2a lidar algorithms that retrieve the aerosol and cloud optical property profiles and classify the detected targets are grouped together in the so-called A-PRO (ATLID-profile) processor. The A-PRO processor produces the ATLID L2a Aerosol product (A-AER), the Extinction, Backscatter and Depolarization product (A-EBD), the ATLID L2a Target Classification (A-TC), and the ATLID L2a Ice microphysical estimation product (A-ICE). This paper provides and overview of the processor and its component algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]