The EarthCARE mission is the sixth Earth Explorer mission due for launch in 2013. The objective of the mission is to quantify the impact of clouds and aerosols on outgoing radiation. For this purpose, the mission will accurately measure profiles of clouds and aerosols and top-of-the-atmosphere radiation.

The core of the payload will be a W-band cloud radar with Doppler capability, provided by the Japane Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, and a cloud and aerosol lidar, operating in the UV wavelengths region and equipped with a high spectral resolution and depolarisation measurement receiver.

Aside from the mission's research objective, EarthCARE has a very strong potential for operational numerical weather prediction (NWP). If cloud observations made by the radar and lidar can be assimilated into an operational global NWP model, the mission would provide new and highly beneficial new data types to NWP.

This activity shall provide the scientific basis for pre-operational use of space-borne cloud radar and lidar observations. This shall be achieved mainly by utilising presently available similar lidar and radar data as a test case for EarthCARE. The output of the activity shall be the capability to assimilate cloud radar and lidar data including the monitoring of their quality