WIVERN Science Data Utilization and Impact STudy for ocean current monitoring applications.

WIVERN, the WInd VElocity Radar Nephoscope - a mission dedicated to the observation of in-cloud winds, and micro- and macro-physical properties of clouds and precipitation - has been recommended to proceed to phase A as a candidate for ESA’s 11th Earth Explorer (EE11) (Illingworth et al., 2018; ESA, 2023). The WIVERN payload is a conically scanningW-band coherent radar implementing the “Polarization Diversity Pulse-Pair” (PDPP) technique (Pazmany et al., 1999) to provide Doppler measurements of in-cloud wind. This design is reminiscent of designs proposed in the framework of two other missions dedicated to the study of the ocean “Total Surface Current Vector” (TSCV), SKIM, a candidate EE9 concept (ESA, 2019), and ODYSEA, a NASA/JPL concept currently under evaluation as part of the NASA Earth System Explorers program (Rodriguez et al., 2019; Torres et al., 2023). In this context, ESA has funded the “WIVERN science Data Utilization and Impact Study for ocean current monitoring applications” to provide an assessment of the capabilities of WIVERN to provide as a secondary product Doppler measurements of the TSCV over the ocean. A necessary first step of this assessment is the consolidation of an error budget for potential WIVERN ocean products. The aim of this report is to document this effort.