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The article discusses the Earth Cloud, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) satellite mission, which is a joint effort between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The mission aims to improve weather forecasts and climate projections by studying cloud, aerosol, and radiation processes. EarthCARE will use novel instruments to retrieve more accurate properties of clouds, aerosols, and precipitation, and provide in-orbit verification of their impact on radiative fluxes. The article also pays tribute to Dr. Tobias Wehr, the mission scientist who passed away in 2023 and played a crucial role in the development of EarthCARE. [Extracted from the article]

The graphics processing units (GPUs) are becoming a compelling acceleration strategy for geoscience numerical model due to their powerful computing performance. In this study, AMD's heterogeneous compute interface for portability (HIP) was implemented to port the GPU acceleration version of the Piecewise Parabolic Method (PPM) solver (GPU-HADVPPM) from the NVIDIA GPUs to China' s domestically GPU-like accelerators as GPU-HADVPPM4HIP, and further introduced the multi-level hybrid parallelism scheme to improve the total computational performance of the HIP version of CAMx (CAMx-HIP) model on the China' s domestically heterogeneous cluster. The experimental results show that the acceleration effect of GPU-HADVPPM on the different GPU accelerator is more obvious when the computing scale is larger and the maximum speedup of GPU-HADVPPM on the domestic GPU-like accelerator is 28.9 times. The hybrid parallelism with a message passing interface (MPI) and HIP enables achieve up to 17.2 times speedup when configure 32 CPU cores and GPU-like accelerators on the domestic heterogeneous cluster. And the OpenMP technology is introduced to further reduce the computation time of CAMx-HIP model by 1.9 times. More importantly, by comparing the simulation results of GPU-HADVPPM on NVIDIA GPUs and domestic GPU-like accelerators, it is found that the simulation results of GPU-HADVPPM on domestic GPU-like accelerators have less difference than the NVIDIA GPUs, and the reason for this difference may be related to the fact that the NVIDIA GPU sacrifices part of the accuracy for improved computing performance. All in all, the domestic GPU-like accelerators are more accuracy for scientific computing in the field of geoscience numerical models. Furthermore, we also exhibit that the data transfer efficiency between CPU and GPU has an important impact on heterogeneous computing, and point out that optimizing the data transfer efficiency between CPU and GPU is one of the important directions to improve the computing efficiency of geoscience numerical models in heterogeneous clusters in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) is a satellite mission implemented by the European Space Agency (ESA) in cooperation with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to measure vertical profiles of aerosols, clouds, and precipitation properties together with radiative fluxes and derived heating rates. The data will be used in particular to evaluate the representation of clouds, aerosols, precipitation, and associated radiative fluxes in weather forecasting and climate models. The satellite embarks four instruments: the ATmospheric LIDar (ATLID), the Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR), the Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI), and the Broadband Radiometer (BBR). The science data acquired by the four satellite instruments are processed on ground. Calibrated instrument data – level 1 data products – and retrieved geophysical data products – level 2 data products – are produced in the ESA and JAXA ground segments. This paper provides an overview of the data processing chains of ESA and JAXA and explains the instrument level 1 data products and main aspects of the calibration algorithms. Furthermore, an overview of the level 2 data products, with references to the respective dedicated papers, is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]