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The European Space Agency's Aeolus mission, launched in August 2018, provides the first global horizontal line‐of‐sight wind profile measurements. Previous studies have shown that Aeolus winds in global forecast systems improve the overall forecast skill, especially in the upper tropospheric tropics and in other data‐sparse regions. In this study, we use a series of observing system experiments with the latest version of the reprocessed Aeolus wind product (2B11) to better characterize the locations and drivers of improved skill from Aeolus with Environment and Climate Change Canada's Global Deterministic Prediction System. Observing system experiments that test the impact of Aeolus winds and the impact of all operational wind observations are carried out, covering the period summer 2019 and winter 2019–2020. Assimilation of operational winds improves the tropospheric wind forecast over the Tropics by a reduction of 8% in the forecast error, and adding the Aeolus winds to the assimilations results in an extra 0.7–0.9%. Aeolus wind impacts are improvements are 0.7–0.9% for the Arctic, and 0.4–0.6% over the Northern and Southern Hemisphere extratropics. The scale dependence of these impacts is investigated using spatial spectra (spherical harmonic decomposition). The improvement is quantified using the difference of the 250 hPa kinetic energy forecast error spectra between experiments. The operational winds largely improve the forecast of planetary scale to intermediate scale for spherical wave numbers between 1 and 20 in the short‐range forecasts. The operational wind impact decreases as the forecast lead time increases. On the other hand, the impact of Aeolus is mostly seen in the intermediate to large scale range with a peak around spherical wave number 8. The Aeolus‐related improvement around this wave number increases with forecast lead time. This analysis suggests that Aeolus winds provide estimates of the wind state that are valuable and complementary to that provided from current operational winds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 2018, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Aeolus satellite, whose Atmospheric LAser Doppler INstrument (ALADIN) is the first space-borne Doppler wind lidar to regularly measure vertical profiles of horizontal line-of-sight (HLOS) winds with global sampling. This mission is intended to assess improvement to numerical weather prediction provided by wind observations in regions poorly constrained by atmospheric mass, such as the tropics, but also, potentially, in polar regions such as the Arctic where direct wind observations are especially sparse. There remain gaps in the evaluation of the Aeolus products over the Arctic region, which is the focus of this contribution. Here, an assessment of the Aeolus Level-2B (L2B) wind product is carried out, progressing from specific locations in the Canadian North to the pan-Arctic. In particular, Aeolus data are compared to a limited sample of coincident ground-based Ka-band radar measurements at Iqaluit, Nunavut, to a larger set of coincident radiosonde measurements over the Canadian North, to Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC)'s short-range forecast, and to the reanalysis product, ERA5, from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Periods covered include the early phase of the first laser flight model (flight model A – FM-A; September to October 2018), the early phase of the second laser flight model (flight model B – FM-B; August to September 2019), and the middle phase of FM-B (December 2019 to January 2020). The adjusted r -squared between Aeolus and other local datasets is around 0.9 except for lower values for the comparison to the Ka-band radar, reflecting limited sampling opportunities with the radar data. This consistency is degraded by about 10 % for the Rayleigh winds in the summer due to solar background noise and other possible errors. Over the pan-Arctic, consistency, with correlation greater than 0.8, is found in the Mie channel from the planetary boundary layer to the lower stratosphere (near surface to 16 km a.g.l.) and in the Rayleigh channel from the troposphere to the stratosphere (2 to 25 km a.g.l.). In all three periods, Aeolus standard deviations are found to be 5 % to 40 % greater than those from ECCC-B and ERA5. We found that the L2B estimated error product for Aeolus is coherent with the differences between Aeolus and the other datasets and can be used as a guide for expected consistency. Our work shows that the high quality of the Aeolus dataset that has been demonstrated globally applies to the sparsely sampled Arctic region. It also demonstrates the lack of available independent wind measurements in the Canadian North, lending urgency to the need to augment the observing capacity in this region to ensure suitable calibration and validation of future space-borne Doppler wind lidar (DWL) missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 2018, the European Space Agency launched the Aeolus satellite, whose Atmospheric LAser Doppler INstrument (ALADIN) is the first spaceborne Doppler wind lidar to regularly measure vertical profiles of horizontal line-of-sight (HLOS) winds with global sampling. This mission is intended to assess improvement to numerical weather prediction provided by wind observations in regions poorly constrained by atmospheric mass, such as the tropics, but also, potentially, in polar regions such as the Arctic where direct wind observations are especially sparse. There remain gaps in the evaluation of the Aeolus products over the Arctic region, which is the focus of this contribution. Here, an assessment of the Aeolus Level-2B wind product is carried out from measurement stations in Canada's north, to the pan-Arctic, with Aeolus data being compared to Ka-band radar measurements at Iqaluit, Nunavut; to radiosonde measurements over Northern Canada; to Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC)'s short-range forecast; and to the reanalysis product, ERA5, from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Periods covered include the early phase during the first laser nominal flight model (FM-A; 2018-09 to 2018-10), the early phase during the second flight laser (FM-B; 2019-08 to 2019-09), and the mid-FM-B periods (2019-12 to 2020-01). The adjusted r-square between Aeolus and other local datasets are around 0.9, except for somewhat lower values in comparison with the ground-based radar, presumably due to limited sampling. This consistency degraded by about 10 % for the Rayleigh winds in the summer, presumably due to scattering from the solar background. Over the pan-Arctic, consistency, with correlation greater than 0.8, is found in the Mie channel from the planetary boundary layer to the lower stratosphere (near surface to 16 km a.g.l.) and in the Rayleigh channel from the troposphere to the stratosphere (2 km to 25 km a.g.l.). Zonal and meridional projections of the HLOS winds are separated to account for the systematic changes in HLOS winds arising from sampling wind components from different viewing orientations in the ascending and descending phases. In all cases, Aeolus standard deviations are found to be 20 % greater than those from ECCC-B and ERA5. We found that L2B estimated error product for Aeolus is coherent with the differences between Aeolus and the other datasets, and can be used as a guide for expected consistency. Thus, our work confirms the quality of the Aeolus dataset over the Arctic and shows that the new Aeolus L2B wind product provides a valuable addition to current wind products in regions such as the Arctic Ocean region where few direct wind observations have been available to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]