Across Mediterranean Experiment for the Cal/Val of the Earthcare Mission

The EarthCARE mission of ESA & JAXA will be launched in May 2024. The mission will provide observations of aerosols, clouds, precipitation, and solar and thermal radiative flux measurements on a global scale, with a goal to constrain the uncertainties in aerosol, cloud, radiation, and their interactions. Before the utilization of the mission’s observations on science studies, calibration/validation activities are necessary to evaluate the uncertainties of its products. To support the timely and maximum exploitation of EarthCARE products, the ACROSS Mediterranean experiment will be implemented in 2024, 2025, and 2026. ACROSS is a joint effort of several institutes and universities in Europe, which will deploy advanced state-of-the-art instruments tailored for the mission’s validation requirements in three Mediterranean supersites (Potenza-Italy, Antikythera-Greece, Cyprus). The ground-based remote sensing measurements will be enhanced with airborne measurements on board UAVs, light aircraft, and large airborne platforms which will perform measurements in the Mediterranean region. The synergistic dataset will be exploited for a thorough validation of the EarthCARE mission, but also for the science studies including aerosol-cloud-radiation interaction studies and numerical weather prediction optimizations for the region.