Mesoscale organisation of tropical convection (https://maestro.aeris-data.fr/)
A Raman lidar to sample horizontal weather fields between clouds
A-WALI is the first meteorological lidar to use Raman technology on board an aircraft to measure the horizontal fields of crucial weather and climate parameters such as water vapour, temperature, clouds and aerosols. It was developed at the CEA to meet the scientific objectives of the ERC MAESTRO project (Mesoscale organisation of tropical convection, https://maestro.aeris-data.fr) coordinated by the INSU, but its scientific and industrial scope is much broader for the CEA.
The spatial organisation of mesoscale clouds, i.e. the tendency of convective clouds to aggregate and form clusters of varying horizontal and vertical extent, plays an important role in climate and meteorology. It modulates large-scale meteorological fields, the radiation balance of the Earth system and the intensity of extreme precipitation events. There are still few observations of the organisation of convective clouds and their environment over the oceans. MAESTRO, using the A-WALI lidar and numerous other in-situ measurement and multidirectional remote sensing instruments, aims to fill this gap via an airborne campaign conducted from the ATR-42 aircraft belonging to the SAFIRE unit of INSU, CNES and Météo-France. This work is part of the international ORCESTRA experiment (Organized Convection Experiments in the Tropical Atlantic) supported by the World Climate Research Programme.
