The CloudSat Mission and the A-Train: A Revolutionary Approach to Observing Earth's Atmosphere

On April 28, 2006 a millimeter radar system, designed expressly for the vertical profiling of hydrometeors, was launched from Vandenburg Air Force Base. Both Cloudsat, carrying the cloud profiling radar (CPR), and the lidar satellite CALIPSO, were inserted into nearly identical orbits each approximately one minute behind the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) Aqua satellite and in formation with the French PARASOL satellite and the EOS Aura satellite. This creates the A- Train satellite constellation. The early results of the CloudSat mission underscore the value of synergy of the A- Train observations for studying clouds and precipitation.