The EarthCARE mission: Mission concept and lidar instrument pre-development

The Earth Clouds, Aerosols, and Radiation Explorer mission has been selected as the 6th Earth Explorer mission of ESA’s Living Planet programme [1]. A suite of four instruments, active and passive, will be embarked on the same satellite to measure cloud and aerosol properties simultaneously with TOA radiances in order to derive TOA fluxes in relation to clouds and aerosols.