Integration and preparation for the next HALO mission PERCUSION is ongoing.
PERCUSION is planned as a nine-week EarthCARE centered campaign that will focus both on EarthCARE characterization and on studies of deep convection over the tropical Atlantic close to the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ) in mid to late summer (between August to October 2024). The objectives of PERCUSION are:
1. PERCUSION will validate EarthCARE both in terms of observed quantities (e.g. reflectivities and radiances) and derived products (e.g. water contents and cloud structures) to guide the use of its data in synergy with a new generation of geostationary satellites for global observation of tropical cloud structures in service of the second objective (O2).
2. PERCUSION seeks to understand how air-mass properties and meso-scale dynamical processes, influence the structure and dynamics of the ITCZ, and to quantify how the organization of both shallow and deep convection influences local and remote cloud radiative properties. In this respect, processes of special interest are: (a) Convective selfaggregation, (b) interactions of aerosol, cloud, and precipitation, (c) ice formation, and (d)
boundary layer dynamics and thermodynamics.