The Athena-OAWL Doppler Wind Lidar Mission

Abstract

With the objective of providing tropospheric wind profile data over the mid-latitude oceans and tropics for data-starved weather forecast models, the Earth Venture Instrument (EV-I) Mission concept “Atmospheric Transport, Hurricanes, and Extratropical Numerical weAther prediction with the Optical Autocovariance Wind Lidar” (ATHENA-OAWL) was proposed in November 2013. The mission concept is described here along with a brief history of the OAWL system development and current development of an ATHENA-OAWL airborne demonstrator under NASA’s Venture Technology development.