A New Capability for Monitoring Multi-Level Tropospheric Winds
The 2017-2027 Decadal Survey for Earth Science and Applications from Space lays out goals for
an observing system that provides three-dimensional winds in the planetary boundary layer and
free troposphere. This ambitious vision will require contributions from different types of
observing systems to provide the spatial resolution and global revisit rate required for an
integrated wind observing system to meet science goals. A new instrument called the Compact
Midwave-Infrared System (CMIS) was completed in 2021 as a passive, high-resolution
component of a global wind monitoring capability. CMIS has the capability to provide day/night
atmospheric motion vectors (AMVs) at 1-km grid spacing in the upper troposphere, at the top of
stratocumulus-covered planetary boundary layers, and at the level of smoke plumes from
wildfires. A future space system hosting CMIS would rely on a mature stereoscopic imaging
technique applied to the same scene from two satellites (LEO-LEO or LEO-GEO) to
simultaneously and unambiguously retrieve AMVs, cloud-top temperatures (CTTs), and cloud
geometric heights (CGHs) from multi- angle, multi-spectral observations of clouds and aerosols.
Due to its wide field of view and potential for flying on a constellation of small satellites, CMIS
can complement the coverage of passive and active wind observing systems such as MiSTIC
winds, Bi-static radar receiver surface winds, and LIDAR. An airborne test campaign of four
NASA Gulfstream III flights successfully demonstrated CMIS capabilities. This presentation will
describe the results of those flights including a limited comparison against the ADM Aeolus lidar
and describe a concept of operations for detecting horizontal and vertical motions at cloud tops.
