MEGHA-TROPIQUES SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVES

MEGHA-TROPIQUES is a satellite mission designed to study convective systems, focusing on the analysis of water cycle with water vapour distribution and transport, convective systems life cycle and energy exchanges in the tropical belt. The tropical areas are those where the most intensive energy exchanges occur : radiative exchanges, latent heat exchanges, transport of constituents and energy through dynamic processes. The science goal is to increase the understanding of the energetic and hydrologic processes in the tropics and the way they influence the global circulation of the atmosphere and oceans and climate variability. While the main purposes for developing a tropical data set are to support climate predictions studies, climate and whether models validation, over tropical areas, the mission will also provide relevant data for global earth climate understanding as tropical processes may also affect the global climate.

The science objectives have been divided in 3 classes:

The first objective is to collect a long-term set of measurements with a good time sampling and coverage over tropical latitudes to better understand the processes related to large tropical convective systems and their life cycle.
Data obtained from satellite observations shall contribute to improve the determination of water and energy budgets at various time-space scales.
Obtaining significant statistics on the conditions in which tropical convective systems are formed and evolve, analysing the way they interact with the general circulation of the atmosphere, studying the inter-annual and inter-seasonal variations and diurnal cycle of the systems, should help the scientists to improve parameterisation inside climate and meteorological models and assimilation of data related to convective system in forecasts models.

The final objective of the mission is to obtain significant advances in the understanding of the impacts of these convective systems on the tropical climate and improve our abilities to predict them at different time-space scales.

The Megha-Tropiques mission will provide the following geophysical parameters:

Cloud condensed water content
Cloud ice content
Convective-stratiform cloud discrimination
Rain rate
Latent heat release
Integrated water vapour content
Radiative fluxes at the top of the atmosphere
Sea surface wind

Latest Update 09/10/2006