A satellite that will greatly boost Europe’s Earth observation capabilities has gone into orbit after it was launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia on 16 February 2016.
Sentinel-3A lifted off at 1757 UTC on a Rockot launcher. It will circle Earth at an altitude of 815 km.
Data from the satellite will help ECMWF to implement the EU-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service and Atmosphere Monitoring Service (C3S and CAMS).
Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B, an identical satellite to be launched in 2017 to ensure optimum global coverage, have been developed by the European Space Agency (ESA).
After a five-month commissioning phase, the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Satellites (EUMETSAT) will take over the operation of Sentinel-3A from ESA.
“Resilient”
The Sentinel-3 mission will have a wide range of applications in environmental and climate monitoring, numerical weather prediction and atmospheric composition.
“CAMS will make direct use of two products from Sentinel-3: aerosol optical depth (AOD) and fire radiative power (FRP),” Head of CAMS Vincent-Henri Peuch explained in a recent interview with ESA. “Sentinel-3 offers a resilient and operational observational capability for the decade to come and more.”
C3S aims to provide time series of climate data for variables such as sea level, sea and land surface temperature, sea ice, ice sheets and ocean colour.
“Sentinel-3, designed to ensure the continuity of the ERS, Envisat, and also CryoSat satellites, provides the prospect of delivering high-quality estimates of these key variables for the next two decades, which is of huge interest for climate monitoring purposes,” the Head of C3S, Jean-Noël Thépaut, told ESA.
Impact on forecasts
Data provided by Sentinel-3A’s instruments will also support numerical weather prediction at ECMWF.
The Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar Altimeter (SRAL) makes surface topographic measurements of the ocean, sea ice, ice sheets, rivers and lakes. It is supported by a microwave radiometer (MWR) for atmospheric correction.
“We have shown that the assimilation of significant wave height from various altimeters can reduce the model’s wave height error by up to 9 per cent,” says ECMWF scientist Saleh Abdalla.
He adds that wave height assimilation also has a small positive impact on atmospheric forecasts, and that initialising ECMWF’s ocean models using altimeter sea-surface height data improves seasonal forecast skill.
Data on total column water vapour from the satellite’s Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) will also be of interest to ECMWF.
ECMWF uses satellite data on significant wave height, sea-surface height, surface wind speed and total column water vapour to verify its model and assess model changes, Dr Abdalla points out.
Top image: ESA/Pierre Carril