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Projecte llegit

Títol: Implementation of a friendly environment to intercompare space-borne and ground-based lidar measurement products

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: RODRÍGUEZ GÓMEZ, ALEJANDRO

Departament: TSC

Títol: Implementation of a friendly environment to intercompare space-borne and ground-based lidar measurement products

Data inici oferta: 04-09-2025     Data finalització oferta: 04-04-2026


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    MU AEROSPACE S&T 21
    MU AI4CI
    MU DRONS
    MU EM CODAS 1
    MU EM CODAS 2
    MU MASTEAM 2015
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Paraules clau:
Remote sensing, Lidar, Satellite-borne instruments, Calibration/Validation
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
EarthCARE satellite has been operational from September 2024. Sentinel 4 and 5 satellites will be launched soon and preliminary synthetic data is available already.
The UPC lidar group is part of the calibration/validation team. More precisely, it is performing measurements with two lidar instruments simultaneously with the overpasses of the satellite.
The main objective of the satellite is the development of a tool in Python to intercompare the measurements in different levels, from the two ground instruments and the satellite-borne one. The tool will be running in the cloud computing platform of the TSC department.
Main activities:
1. Familiarization with the existing Python tools.
2. Familiatization with a cloud computing environment.
3. Strategies for the determination of simultaneous measurements.
4. Development of a graphic user interface for presenting the results.
5. Generation of reports
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
Atmospheric aerosols affect Earth's climate by scattering and absorbing sunlight and modifying cloud properties. Their vertical distribution remains one of the largest uncertainties in current climate models. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) instruments measure and profile this distribution with high spatial detail. Ground-based networks such as European Aerosol Research LiDAR Network (EARLINET) and Micro-Pulse LiDAR Network (MPLNet) provide long-term reference measurements at fixed stations, while satellite missions such as Cloud-Aerosol LiDAR and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) and Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCare) extend these observations to the global scale. Validating satellite profiles against ground-based observations requires spatial and temporal matching, altitude grid alignment and quantitative comparison metrics. If done manually this is a time-consuming process with lots of room for error. This thesis presents Aerosol Profile EXplorer (APEX), a MATLAB application that automates the retrieval, spatial co-location and quantitative comparison of satellite and ground-based aerosol LiDAR profiles. APEX integrates data from EarthCare and CALIPSO on the satellite side and from EARLINET/Aerosol, Clouds and Trace Gases Research Infrastructure (ACTRIS) and MPLNet on the ground side. A central part of the application's architecture is the modular provider system. Meaning, that each data source has its own component that exposes source-specific formats and access methods through a shared interface. Therefore, adding a future platform requires only a new provider and no changes to the core of the application. The graphical user interface built with MATLAB App Designer lets users search for satellite overpasses at any supported ground station, download coincident data and produce profile plots including the respective uncertainty bars. Mean bias, root mean square error and mean relative difference are computed automatically over a user-selected altitude window. Finally, the application is tested on three aerosol events.

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