The paper presents a comprehensive approach to improve the geolocation accuracy of spaceborne radar and lidar systems, crucial for the successful interpretation of data from the upcoming EarthCARE mission. The paper details the technical background of the presented methods and various examples of geolocation analyses, including a short period of CloudSat observations when the star tracker was not operating properly and lifetime statistics from the CloudSat and CALIPSO missions.

Instruments for air quality observations on geostationary satellites provide multiple observations per day and allow for the analysis of the diurnal variation of important air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) over large areas. The South Korean instrument GEMS, launched in February 2020, is the first instrument in geostationary orbit and covers a large part of Asia. Our investigations show the observed diurnal evolution of NO₂ at different measurement sites.

This paper describes a new treatment of the spatial misregistration of cloud properties for Sentinel-5 Precursor, when the footprints of different spectral bands are not perfectly aligned. The methodology exploits synergies between spectrometers and imagers, like TROPOMI and VIIRS. The largest improvements have been identified for heterogeneous scenes at cloud edges. This approach is generic and can also be applied to future Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5 instruments.