Robin Hogan

Green party wins Gorton and Denton byelection, pushing Labour to third place in blow to Keir Starmer Hannah Spencer elected as party’s first MP in northern England, as Labour sees a 25.3% drop in vote compared to 2024

Great result for progressive politics in the UK. If the first law of politics is "learn to count" (LBJ), the 2nd has to be "don't abandon your base". Labour's response to the far-right threat has been to lurch to the right - who'd have guessed this wouldn't work? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I'm currently writing up a paper in which we used FAAM underflights of EarthCARE to evaluate and refine its retrievals of cloud properties and updrafts, crucial to building trust in EarthCARE's global measurements of clouds and their impact on climate. This is a bad day for UK science. (2/2)

Crazy to axe the world-class FAAM aircraft - a big blow to observational atmospheric research in the UK. I've used data from the Hercules and then its successor the FAAM since starting my PhD in 1995 - there's no substitute for getting right inside a cloud to find out what's really going on! (1/2)

Amazing image of the properties of marine stratocumulus clouds begin modified by ships underneath them, as revealed by EarthCARE's Multi-Spectral Imager in the North Pacific. Full story at earth.esa.int/eogateway/su...

YouTube video by ClimateAdam Climate Scientist Reacts to AI Overlords

This new video from @climateadam.bsky.social is even more brilliant than usual - insightful and hilarious 🧐🤣❤️

www.youtube.com/watch?v=py0X...

Job opportunity! 3.5-year postdoc at the Dept of Meteorology, University of Reading, to improve convective storms in high resolution models using #EarthCARE and other data, including close collaboration with both ECMWF and the Met Office - deadline 27 February: jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Save the date! The next #EarthCARE Science and Validation Workshop will be 8-12 June 2026 in the beautiful city of Oxford, deadline for abstracts is 27 February: www.earthcare-science-validation-2026.org

You can catch up with all the EarthCARE web stories at www.earthcarescience.net/web-stories - there were 21 articles in 2025, and will be many more in 2026!

The left column shows various EarthCARE measurements of a deep nimbostratus cloud over Ontario. The right column shows comparisons between EarthCARE’s estimates and in situ aircraft measurements. The bottom two rows confirm that the terminal fall speed of snowflakes is fairly constant whereas the vertical motion of the air fluctuates rapidly and can be estimated well from EarthCARE, the first time this has been possible from space.

There have now been 100 aircraft under-flights of #EarthCARE, each providing invaluable information to calibrate and validate the data products. This example shows very good agreement between EarthCARE and aircraft vertical air motion in nimbostratus. Full article here: earth.esa.int/eogateway/su...

Here is the wider context: satellite observations on the left and the two model versions on the right, visible imagery on top and thermal infrared on the bottom. The eye is stubbornly too wide in the model: what should we change in the model to improve this?

Doppler velocity (positive up) through Hurricane Humberto: top is EarthCARE, middle is the ECMWF 9-km model and bottom is the ECMWF 4.4-km model.

Never before have we been able to measure vertical velocities from space: on the top is EarthCARE showing falling rain and snow (blue) but in the eye-wall the cloud particles are lofted up (red). The next two panels show the 9- and 4.4-km models with the 4.4-km starting to capture the updrafts!

Radar reflectivity through Hurricane Humberto: top is EarthCARE, middle is the ECMWF 9-km model and bottom is the ECMWF 4.4-km model.

In this ECMWF blog post, Mark Fielding compares model simulations at 9- and 4.4-km resolution with #EarthCARE radar observations of Hurricane Humberto, which was sampled right through its eye on 28 September 2025: www.ecmwf.int/en/about/med...

A unified synergistic retrieval of clouds, aerosols, and precipitation from EarthCARE: the ACM-CAP product Abstract. ACM-CAP provides a synergistic best-estimate retrieval of all clouds, aerosols, and precipitation detected by the atmospheric lidar (ATLID), cloud-profiling radar (CPR), and multi-spectral i...

The paper describing the synergy retrievals is here: amt.copernicus.org/articles/16/...

YouTube video by ESA Extras EarthCARE’s instruments work in synergy to improve climate models

Check out in particular the video explaining how the synergy retrievals are evaluated by "radiative closure": www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d_k...

EarthCARE lifts the clouds on climate models True to its promise, the European Space Agency’s EarthCARE satellite is now being used to calculate directly how clouds and aerosols influence Earth’s energy balance – the all-important balance that r...

All EarthCARE data have now been released! www.esa.int/Applications...

EarthCARE satellite “Hakuryu” – All Observation Data Now Publicly Available! – JAXA Satellite Navigator / Space Technology Directorate I The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have developed the Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Ex...

More information here: www.satnavi.jaxa.jp/en/news/2025...

First day of the EarthCARE Science & Validation workshop on the beautiful University of Tokyo campus! Takuji Kubota described today's release of all the Japanese products, including those using the synergy of 3 & 4 instruments.

Exploring EarthCARE Data and Analysis Tools - Earth Online To fully exploit the wealth of EarthCARE data, ESA and its partners have developed a comprehensive suite of data access, visualisation, analysis, and simulation tools. These tools not only support sci...

Nice article about the various online and offline visualization and analysis tools that are available for exploring EarthCARE data - thanks to Eleni Marinou (@elmarinou.bsky.social) who coordinates the development of these tools! earth.esa.int/eogateway/ne...

Exciting week next week with the release of the full tranche of #EarthCARE products, including those using 3 and 4 of the instruments in synergy! JAXA held a media briefing earlier today and I explained why this is important (48mins in). www.youtube.com/live/9375tqa...

Contrail climate effects under EarthCARE’s spotlight - Earth Online Reducing the climate impact of air travel is a key goal, as the sector continues to expand globally. Aviation contributes 2.5% of global carbon dioxide emissions, but the industry is responsible for 5...

Aircraft contrails are contributing to global warming, but the balance between their solar and infrared effects is uncertain. EarthCARE's combination of instruments, particularly its high resolution 3-view broadband radiometer, is perfectly placed to measure them! earth.esa.int/eogateway/su...

Training course: Parametrization of subgrid physical processes This five-day course is a combination of lectures, hands-on practicals and group problem classes. During the course each parametrized process is introduced and discusses theory, modelling and verifica...

This ECMWF training course is a great opportunity to learn about how physical processes are represented in weather and climate models, free for anyone in an ECMWF member state. It runs 2-6 March 2026 and the deadline for applications is 30 November. events.ecmwf.int/event/496/

Nice paper, thanks! ECMWF web article coming soon comparing our observations of Humberto with simulations by the IFS at high resolution.

EarthCARE Science - Tools Online visualization

There are some tools listed at the page below. This image was produced by Shannon Mason using his free ectools package but I would like these to be produced routinely for all EarthCARE frames. www.earthcarescience.net/tools

Would you believe it: just 10 days after #EarthCARE went through the eye of Hurricane Humberto, it did the same with Hurricane Priscilla in the East Pacific on 7 October! A very different beast this one: a huge eye around 100 km across, and very lopsided, with much more rain on the southern side.

Second, the signal from the "Rayleigh" channel of EarthCARE's lidar is strongly related with ocean chlorophyll estimates from routine ocean colour measurements, with the advantage that EarthCARE's lidar can continue to make measurements in polar night!

First, the depolarisation of the land surface measured by EarthCARE's lidar seems to be very well correlated to the widely used "NDVI" vegetation index - but why? We don't yet know but potentially this could be telling us something new about vegetation!

New instruments always throw up surprises - Gerd-Jan van Zadelhoff of KNMI had a look at the #EarthCARE lidar's surface returns and found some intriguing and unexpected things as explained in ESA's latest EarthCARE web story... earth.esa.int/eogateway/su...

And here's EarthCARE's radar reflectivity with GOES-E for context (thanks to Mark Fielding)!

EarthCARE Science - Gallery In addition to the scientific insights we can gain from EarthCARE's precise measurements, the satellite is an inexhaustible source of beautiful imagery.

Plots above thanks to @masonshannon.bsky.social, more on the EarthCARE Science web site www.earthcarescience.net/gallery

The level of detail revealed by EarthCARE is amazing: as well as the usual change in vertical Doppler velocity as snow melts to rain, we can see the rising air in the eye wall! The imager also captures the 3D nature of the convective cells in the rain bands further out. More analysis to come...