Spaceborne Doppler radars for atmospheric dynamics and energy budget studies

The successful deployments of the first spaceborne precipitation radar (TRMM/PR Ku-band, 1997 ) and spaceborne cloud radar (CloudSat/CPR W-band, 2006 ) have demonstrated the feasibility of monitoring atmospheric processes from space with vertical resolutions of a few hundred meters. Future missions being implemented (EarthCARE, W-band ) or envisaged (ACE, Ka- and W-band ) include use of coherent detection to measure the first moment of the Doppler spectrum to observe and analyze the dynamics of atmospheric systems. In this talk we discuss the main challenges and potentials of measuring the Doppler velocity of clouds and precipitation from space.