The ESA EVE Polarization Lidar for Assessing the Aeolus Aerosol Product Perfomance
We present the EVE lidar concept, a combined linear/circular polarization system, tailored to evaluate the spaceborne ALADIN Doppler lidar system aerosol retrievals. EVE, currently under development, aims to provide the ESA Aeolus mission with a flexible, mobile reference ground based lidar system capable of providing well characterized fiducial reference measurements of aerosol optical properties. Since ALADIN detects only the co polar component of the backscattered circularly polarized radiation, a portion of the received radiation gets lost, leading to an un derestimation of the backscatter coefficient and the circular depolarization ratio in strongly depolarizing scenes with non spherical particles. The main focus of the new EVE lidar is to quantify these uncertainties and to evaluate aerosol backscatter/extinction retrievals for Aeolus, and later also for EarthCARE product validation, quality assessment and improvement.