NCEO’s Director, Professor John Remedios, attended the Aeolus press event hosted by Airbus on 17th January 2017 to mark the completion of the Aeolus wind instrument for the European Space Agency.
He was interviewed by ITV’s Alok Jha, whose report featured on the News at Ten on 17th January. Prof Remedios was also interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science by Adam Rutherford: Listen to the interview here (starts at 18 mins)
The BBC reporter Jonathan Amos described the Aeolus spacecraft in his web article: “The Aeolus spacecraft will fire a laser into the atmosphere to make the first three dimensional maps of wind behaviour across the entire planet. The data will be incorporated into the models that project weather patterns a few days ahead.”
“With its ultraviolet laser, it will aim to build a truly global view of how wind blows on Earth from the surface of the planet all the way up through the troposphere and into the stratosphere (from 0km to 30km). It will achieve this by measuring how the pulses of light from its laser are scattered back off air molecules and water droplets, even particles of dust. The return signal will betray not only the altitude of wind streams but also gather some information about their speed and direction.”
Jonathan Amos’ full report on the BBC website is here
John Remedios said, “The molecules in the air and the clouds move with the wind and that motion causes a shift in the frequency of the return signal. The laser sends out a signal at one frequency and you get it back at a slightly different frequency. It’s called the Doppler effect and you’ll be familiar with it from the usual story of how an ambulance siren changes as it passes you in the street.”