The CALIPSO satellite specializes in scanning for thin cloud layers and airborne particles.
Earlier, we talked to CALIPSO's principal investigator, Dr. David Winker, about the satellite's insightful and unique mission.
CALIPSO is a new satellite mission that will give us a new view of the atmosphere.
CALIPSO uses a LIDAR technique which allows us to look at the atmosphere with a great deal of vertical
resolution, and this means that we can, we can see the vertical structure of the atmosphere.
Unlike a typical satellite which gives you something like a picture,
where everything seems to be flat, we can work at the actual distribution in the vertical dimension.
There's many different parts in a satellite mission like this. We have three instruments on the satellite.
We have the LIDAR, we have an infrared imager and we have a visible imager.
The LIDAR is similar to a radar, except it uses a laser to produce pulses of light,
and everything that scatters back to the instrument, we record.
And as the pulse travels down through the atmosphere, we get a record of what it encounters on its way down to the surface.
There are many kinds of aerosols. Maybe the aerosol we're most familiar with is hairspray that comes in an aerosol can.
Small droplets come out of the can and they remain suspended in the atmosphere for awhile because they're so small.
Well, there's many other types of aerosols -- dust, for example. Pollution produces aerosols.
Tiny, tiny liquid droplets that remain suspended in the atmosphere for weeks, sometimes.
And in large concentrations, these aerosols can affect weather and also the climate.
So with the new information we get from CALIPSO on clouds and aerosols,
we'll get a better understanding of our atmosphere and how our climate system works.
We'll be able to improve the models that they use to predict weather, so we'll get better predictions of weather.
We'll be able to predict air quality better.
We're finding that air quality in a given region can be affected by an area far away because the pollution is transported,
and so CALIPSO will give us insight into how pollution is transported.
And once we know where the pollution is coming from, then we can try to correct it.