With the launch of the novel Aeolus wind profiling mission, a wealth of direct wind and atmospheric backscatter profile observations has become available across the globe, revealing new information on atmospheric dynamics and optical properties to the benefit of a number of applications. These applications include, for example, improvements in numerical weather prediction (NWP), general circulation models (GCMs) and their included parameterized processes, such as land and ocean drag, convection, stratosphere–troposphere interaction and atmospheric waves, air quality and air pollution transport, etc. In this special issue, new data products and their validation as well as studies using the Aeolus data for application in meteorology, air quality, and climate studies are discussed. Topics vary from observation interpretation to GCM or NWP model diagnostics, parameterization, and data assimilation experiments. This is the first special issue on scientific analysis of Aeolus mission data, including inter-comparisons with different collocated wind profiling, aerosol and cloud in situ and remote-sensing measurements, and atmospheric models. Contributions concerning Aeolus data calibration, processing, and tools for data access and exploitation are also provided.