Evaluation of Aeolus L2B wind product with wind profiling radar measurements and numerical weather prediction model equivalents over Australia

Carrying a laser Doppler instrument, the Aeolus satellite was launched in 2018, becoming the first mission for atmospheric wind profile measurements from space. Before utilizing the Aeolus winds for different applications, evaluating their data quality is essential. With the help of ground-based wind profiling radar measurements and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) model equivalents, this study quantifies the error characteristics of Aeolus L2B (baseline-11) near-real-time horizontal line-of-sight winds across Australia during October 2020–March 2021 by using both inter-comparison and triple collocation analysis. The results of the inter-comparison analysis indicate that both Rayleigh-clear winds and Mie-cloudy winds are in good agreement with the ground-based radar measurements with overall absolute mean biases smaller than 0.7 m s−1 and correlation coefficients larger than or equal to 0.9. Moreover, assuming the radar measurements as the reference data set, Mie-cloudy winds are shown to be more precise than Rayleigh-clear winds with an overall random error of 4.14 and 5.81 m s−1, respectively. Similar results were also found from triple collocation analysis, with error standard deviations of 5.61 and 3.50 m s−1 for Rayleigh-clear winds and Mie-cloudy winds. In addition, the Mie channel is shown to be more capable of capturing the wind in the planetary boundary layer (< 1500 m). The findings of this study demonstrate the good performance of space-borne Doppler lidar for wind profiling and provide valuable information for data assimilation in numerical weather prediction.