The WInd VElocity Radar Nephoscope (WIVERN): a candidate mission for the ESA Earth Explorer 11

The WIVERN (WInd VElocity Radar Nephoscope) concept, now in Phase0 of the ESA Earth Explorer program, promises to complement Doppler wind lidar by globally observing, for the first time, the vertical profiles of winds in cloudy areas. The mission will also strengthen the cloud and precipitation observation capability of the Global Observing System by providing unprecedented revisit time of cloud and precipitation vertical profiles. The mission hinges upon a single instrument, i.e., a dual-polarization Doppler W-band scanning cloud radar with a 3 m circular aperture non-deployable main reflector. The WIVERN antenna conically scans a large swath (of about 800 km) around nadir at an off-nadir angle of about 38o at 12 rpm (revolutions per minute). This viewing geometry allows daily revisits poleward of 50°, 50-km horizontal resolution, and approximately 1-km vertical resolution.In this presentation, we will discuss the scientific objectives of the mission and will outline some of the technical challenges of the measuring technique. We will also present examples of Level 1 products via an end to end simulations applied to high resolution cloud resolving models and expected performances of the instrument in terms of cloud/precipitation and wind coverage.Finally, we will assess the potential of WIVERN for sampling tropical cyclones by producing realistic WIVERN synthetic observations from the long-term CloudSat dataset and ECMWF co-located winds. This provides statistics on how well the WIVERN mission can sample the cloud systems associated to tropical cyclones and monitor their genesis and lifecycle.
The 28th IUGG General Assembly (IUGG2023) (Berlin 2023)