Spaceborne Lidars: Building on Successes (Invited)

The CALIPSO satellite including its Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) has completed 6+ years of continuous operation on-orbit, continuing to meet all of its requirements. It has downlinked over 9 Terabytes of data and supporting telemetry, providing calibrated measurements of the Earth's aerosol and cloud layers for Earth science research. Over 650 peer reviewed studies using CALIOP data have been published to date, providing important new insights into the three-dimensional structure of the atmosphere. These data, along with those from Cloudsat, are beginning to be ingested to improve Global Circulation Models, and global trends are being identified. As CALIPSO continues, the successes and lessons learned enable development of new space-borne lidars to provide improved understanding of Earth systems. These include proposed lidars that will be able to map the Earth's wind field, its aerosol-cloud interactions, and its near-surface oceans. Building on the CALIPSO heritage, these lidar missions can be achieved with acceptable risk and in medium cost constrained missions (e.g. ESSP/Venture).