Future Missions

The Copernicus missions Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5 are designed to provide the atmospheric composition observations needed by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. This presentation covers an overview of the two missions, their atmospheric composition products, and their mission implementation status.

As part of the Copernicus tasks entrusted to EUMETSAT by the European Commission under the Delegation Agreement, Building Block 2, ATSE Atmospheric Services, EUMETSAT will deliver operational Near Real Time (NRT) data and support services for the Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission to be hosted on the MTG-S platform, the Copernicus Sentinel-5 mission to be hosted on the EPS-SG A platform, and NRT atmosphere products and services from Sentinel-3. In addition to the benefits that arise from EUMETSAT’s demonstrated expertise in the provision of operational data products and services, the availability of data and products from EUMETSAT’s own missions brings a wealth of opportunities, in particular related to the potential for the development of synergistic products.

In this presentation we provide an overview of the full suite of instruments relevant to atmospheric composition on the EPS-SG and MTG platforms and highlight the additional value that EUMETSAT brings through this extensive suite of data and products. Particular attention will be paid to the possibility for development of novel synergistic products.

The ALTIUS project was initiated in 2005 by the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy  (BISA) and proposed as an EarthWatch element for subscription by interested countries at the last ESA ministerial council in Dec 2016. Operating onboard an agile PROBA platform, ALTIUS is aimed at atmospheric limb sounding with high vertical resolution.

The mission design will combine bright limb observations, providing  a high spatial and temporal coverage, and  solar-stellar-planet-lunar  occultations in inertial pointing, allowing for high accuracy measurements. The innovative principle of ALTIUS is to take pictures of the earth’s limb with a 2D spectral camera equipped with acousto-optic  or Fabry-Perot tunable filters .

ALTIUS is designed to measure limb radiances between 10 and 100 km, in the 250 to 1800 nm wavelength range, with 3 independent spectral cameras capable of detecting  vertical extinction profiles of several absorbers. The mission objective is twofold:

a primary objective targets the operational monitoring of stratospheric ozone at global scale with a 3 hours timeliness;

secondary objectives address stratospheric and mesospheric composition with a focus on O3, NO2, H2O, CH4, stratospheric aerosols, PSC’s, PMC’s and some airglow emissions.

The autonomy of the ALTIUS space segment allows for a quite elaborated mission scenario to combine several observation geometries and/or calibration campaigns. The baseline mission scenario will be presented as well as various specific observations with dedicated scientific objectives.

The ALTIUS space segment is currently in a design consolidation phase. In parallel, the Payload Data Ground Segment is now under study and the general structure of the Data Processing Model  has been developed by BISA while the necessary processing algorithms are identified and/or optimized.  Preliminary results of the expected performances will be compared with respect to mission objectives.  Open questions and suggestions for operational needs and atmospheric research will be discussed with the atmospheric science community.

In November 2017 the European Space Agency selected FORUM (Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring) as one of the two instrument concepts to be developed further and to compete to be the ninth Earth Explorer mission. FORUM will be a Far-Infrared Spectrometer measuring the upwelling spectral radiance emitted by the Earth across the most relevant infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum from satellite. In particular, the instrument will cover the spectral range from 100 to 1600 cm ⁻¹ (from 100 to 6.25 microns in wavelength), covering the Far InfraRed (FIR), including the 100 and 667 cm ⁻¹ band, which has never been spectrally resolved from space before.

Idealized model simulations suggest that between one quarter and one third of the total clear-sky long-wave cooling of the Earth to space occurs within the FIR spectral region. An even larger fraction of this cooling is predicted to occur in the FIR under all-sky conditions, because the presence of clouds causes lower emitting temperatures, and hence a shift to longer wavelengths of the peak of the black-body curve. For this reason, a detailed study of the Earth’s radiation budget requires accurate, frequent, and global-coverage measurements of the total upwelling irradiance. In this work we will show how FORUM measurements will permit to obtain a very accurate estimate of the upwelling FIR irradiance. Furthermore, the spectral resolution of the measurements will enable to disentangle the contributions of the various contributions (due to gases, surface, clouds) to the outgoing long-wave flux.

Since the FIR part of the upwelling spectral radiance is particularly sensitive to the water vapor content in the Upper Troposphere, FORUM measurements will effectively complement, by flying in tandem with MetOp, the Middle-InfraRed spectrum that will be measured by IASI-NG. In this paper we will show how FORUM and IASI-NG measurements could be synergistically exploited to improve the present knowledge of the water vapor amount in the Upper Troposphere.

Presentation