The Potential of the W-Band Polarization Diversity Doppler Radar Envisaged for the Wivern Mission for Sampling Tropical Cyclones

The WIVERN (WInd VElocity Radar Nephoscope) mission, currently under the Phase-0 of the ESA Earth Explorer program, promises to complement AEOLUS Doppler wind lidar by globally observing, for the first time, vertical profiles of winds in cloudy areas. The objective of this work is to assess the potential of WIVERN for sampling tropical cyclones from the long-term CloudSat dataset. Realistic WIVERN synthetic observations are produced thanks to the recently developed end to end simulator of the WIVERN dual-polarization Doppler conically scanning 94 GHz radar based on CloudSat reflectivity observations and ECMWF co-located winds. The resulting multi-year dataset provides statistics on how well the WIVERN mission can sample the cloud systems associated to tropical cyclones and monitor their genesis and lifecycle. The analysis of the results provides statistics for addressing the following questions for tropical systems: What is the frequency of reliable wind estimates as a function of height? What is the effect of ghost echoes produced by cross-polarization? What is the impact of noise error and how often will the 94 GHz radar signal be fully attenuated by rain?