ATLID: The technology development programme for ESA's satellite-borne atmospheric lidar

The idea of deploying a lidar system on an Earth-orbiting satellite stems from the need for continuously providing profiles of our atmosphereis structure with high resolution and global coverage. Interest in this information for climatology, meteorology and the atmospheric sciences in general is huge. Areas of application range from the determination of global warming and greenhouse effects, to monitoring the transport and accumulation of pollutants in the different atmospheric regions (such as the recent fires in Southeast Asia), to the assessment of the largely unknown micro-physical properties and the structural dynamics of the atmosphere itself.