Chair: Dirk Bernaerts – Co-Chair: TBD

Through their scattering and absorptive properties as well as their interactions, aerosols and clouds can produce a significant influence on the Earth’s radiation balance, and hence on climate. Cloud properties, precipitation and cloud lifetimes are intimately linked to aerosol properties. Pollution due to small size particles can be a threat to health especially in urban areas, and heterogeneous chemical processes can play a significant role in environmental modifications.

Optical and physical characteristics of aerosol particles and spatial distributions relative to their source locations are quite variable in time and space globally, especially in the troposphere. Volcanic aerosol plumes can have devastating effects on aircraft, and if the plumes reside in the stratosphere, significant effects on radiative transfer can occur as experienced, for example, after the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo.

Our oceans are strongly coupled to the atmospheres above them through various processes. Ocean surface height and winds, sub-surface temperature, biological activity, radiative and dynamical forcings at the ocean-atmosphere interface are all key parameters of the Earth system. New high resolution lidar altimetry missions are being proposed, and new techniques using lidar sounding are being explored for retrieving surface and sub-surface ocean properties. Air-sea gas transfer processes, ocean dynamics, biological activity or energy budgets can be revisited in the light of combined active and passive (optical and microwave) observations.

Together with the above, wind is one of the basic variables describing the state of the atmosphere. Improved knowledge of the global wind field in the troposphere and lower stratosphere is needed to improve numerical weather forecasts and to better understand and predict long-term climate change.

Wind profiles are measured by ground-based networks and from some commercial aircraft, but due to the limited coverage (mostly Northern Hemisphere extra-tropics) measurements from orbiting platforms are essential to get more uniform global coverage.

Among many possible techniques, lidar systems offer the best approach for obtaining wind profile observations globally with the required accuracy and coverage. The Winds Session will focus on all aspects associated with measurement of winds in space, including mission concepts, lidar technology, platforms, and scientific returns.

The session will include invited talks describing the status of wind programs, research objectives, science applications, and future plans presented by representatives of the major agencies that pursue space-based global wind measurements.

This session will focus on all aspects associated with the measurement of aerosols, clouds, ocean and wind properties from space, including combinations of multiple measurement techniques using active and passive approaches.

The session will include invited talks describing past, present and future approaches for these measurements. Extended abstracts from the lidar community for inclusion into the Workshop Proceedings are encouraged. A White Paper and Session Summary highlighting the major points discussed at the Workshop will also be included in the Proceedings.