Aqua's first 10 years: An overview

The Aqua spacecraft was launched in May 2002 with six Earth-observing instruments on board to collect data on a wide variety of Earth system variables. After 10 years of on-orbit operations, Aqua has provided data that have contributed to over 2,000 scientific publications, with new results on the Earth's energy budget, trace gases and particulate matter in the atmosphere, vegetation on land and in the oceans, and many aspects of the water cycle. Additionally, the Aqua data have been used for practical applications ranging from weather forecasting to deployment of firefighters and routing of aircraft. Although the 6-year design life of the satellite has been successfully completed and exceeded, enough fuel remains on Aqua for approximately another 10 years of operations.

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[2]  Claire L. Parkinson,et al.  Aqua: an Earth-Observing Satellite mission to examine water and other climate variables , 2003, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[3]  Bryan A. Franz,et al.  Satellite-detected fluorescence reveals global physiology of ocean phytoplankton , 2008 .

[4]  Yongxiang Hu,et al.  Radiative effects of African dust and smoke observed from Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) and Cloud‐Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) data , 2009 .

[5]  David R. Doelling,et al.  Observed changes in top-of-the-atmosphere radiation and upper-ocean heating consistent within uncertainty , 2012 .

[6]  Liguang Wu,et al.  Analysis of the influence of Saharan air layer on tropical cyclone intensity using AIRS/Aqua data , 2009 .

[7]  Hiroshi Ichikawa,et al.  Wind Speed and Latent Heat Flux Retrieved by Simultaneous Observation of Multiple Geophysical Parameters by AMSR-E , 2009 .

[8]  W. Paul Menzel,et al.  Spatial and Temporal Distribution of Clouds Observed by MODIS Onboard the Terra and Aqua Satellites , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[9]  Josefino C. Comiso,et al.  Accelerated decline in the Arctic sea ice cover , 2008 .

[10]  Zhibo Zhang,et al.  An analysis of the dependence of clear-sky top-of-atmosphere outgoing longwave radiation on atmospheric temperature and water vapor , 2008 .

[11]  Frank J. Wentz,et al.  Global Microwave Satellite Observations of Sea Surface Temperature for Numerical Weather Prediction and Climate Research , 2005 .

[12]  Edward T. Olsen,et al.  Interannual variability of mid‐tropospheric CO2 from Atmospheric Infrared Sounder , 2010 .

[13]  Jennifer P. Cannizzaro,et al.  Remote Detection of Trichodesmium Blooms in Optically Complex Coastal Waters: Examples with Modis Full-Spectral Data , 2010 .

[14]  Michael D. King,et al.  Aerosol properties over bright-reflecting source regions , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

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[16]  Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer , 2007 .

[17]  C. Cardinali.  Monitoring the observation impact on the short‐range forecast , 2009 .

[18]  E. Vermote,et al.  Second‐generation operational algorithm: Retrieval of aerosol properties over land from inversion of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer spectral reflectance , 2007 .

[19]  C. Barnet,et al.  Using Satellite Observations to Constrain Parameterizations of Gravity Wave Effects for Global Models , 2006 .

[20]  Thomas S. Pagano,et al.  Satellite remote sounding of mid‐tropospheric CO2 , 2008 .