The EarthCARE mission for monitoring aerosol, cloud and precipitation, and for radiation closure studies will be launched in May 2024. In preparation of the calibration and validation of the Atmospheric Lidar (ATLID) onboard the platform, a lidar simulator tool has been developed for providing realistic simulations of the ATLID lidar signals and the Level 1 (L1) products. The simulated ATLID L1 profiles are used to derive realistic ATLID Level 2A (L2A) profiles of aerosol properties. In this study, the realistic ATLID L2A profiles are compared with the corresponding L2 profiles from the eVe lidar, ESA's ground reference lidar for cal/val studies, and the NOA-PollyXT lidar, an ACTRIS lidar system at the PANGEA station, aiming to investigate the sensitivity of the ATLID design on real aerosol layers. Moreover, key aspects of the validation of the aerosol EarthCARE products using the eVe lidar system as ground reference will be discussed.
Paschou et al. (2026) studied this question.