VITAL Campaigns

VITAL: Vertical profiling of the troposphere: Innovation, opTimization and AppLication

The VITAL (Verti­cal pro­fil­ing of the tro­pos­phere: Inno­va­tion, opTimiza­tion and AppLica­tion) con­cept is part of the Hans Ertel Cen­tre for Weath­er Research (HErZ) and focus­es on nov­el obser­va­tions of the ver­ti­cal struc­ture of the tro­pos­phere. It is a com­mon, net­work­ing effort of four HErZ projects, DWD obser­va­tion­al and mod­el­ing experts as well as dif­fer­ent exter­nal part­ners. The con­cept con­sists of two mea­sure­ment cam­paigns: VITAL I and VITAL II.

VITAL I took place in August 2024 at the Jülich Obser­va­to­ry for Cloud Evo­lu­tion (JOYCE). It gen­er­at­ed ver­ti­cal pro­fil­ing data sets in the ABL to assess instru­ments and meth­ods for the next-gen­er­a­tion DWD obser­va­tion­al net­work, includ­ing Uncrewed Aer­i­al Sys­tems (UAS), water vapor lidar and microwave radiome­ter. The obser­va­tions were com­pared against satel­lite data, Doppler lidar, radioson­des and data from a 120m mete­o­ro­log­i­cal tow­er. VITAL I also par­tic­i­pat­ed in the core phase of the 2024 world-wide WMO UAS Demon­stra­tion cam­paign with two small UAS apply­ing a nov­el, improved wind and tur­bu­lence esti­ma­tion tech­nique. Dur­ing VITAL I, an inter­na­tion­al sum­mer school was held at JOYCE to edu­cate stu­dents from the Bach­e­lor to PhD lev­el in Mod­ern Meth­ods in Atmos­pher­ic Pro­fil­ing.

VITAL II is planned for 2026 and will take place from June 1 – August 31 in the Cologne Bay region between the west Ger­man cities of Cologne, Bonn and Aachen employ­ing and installing up to sev­en pro­fil­ing sites. Dur­ing this time, first data from the Meteosat Third Gen­er­a­tion Sounder (MTG-S1) satel­lite will become avail­able pro­vid­ing con­tin­u­ous 3D obser­va­tions of tem­per­a­ture and humid­i­ty over large parts of Europe and Africa with a tem­po­ral res­o­lu­tion of ~30 min. How­ev­er, deficits will remain in observ­ing the atmos­pher­ic bound­ary lay­er (ABL). VITAL II will lever­age the use of these nov­el satel­lite sounder obser­va­tions by com­bin­ing them with sur­face-based in-situ and remote sens­ing obser­va­tions. Nov­el machine learn­ing algo­rithms which will syn­the­size MTG-S1 data with sur­face-based obser­va­tions will be applied to and assessed by the mul­ti­tude of addi­tion­al VITAL II pro­fil­ing obser­va­tions. The objec­tive is to sig­nif­i­cant­ly enhance the observed infor­ma­tion con­tent in the ABL.

VITAL II  obser­va­tion­al set­up con­cen­trat­ed in the Cologne Bay (CB, see inset fig­ure, upper left). Red mark­ers indi­cate VITAL II ground-based remote sens­ing pro­fil­ing sites for wind, tur­bu­lence, tem­per­a­ture and humid­i­ty. All pro­fil­ing sites are equipped with near-sur­face mete­o­rol­o­gy mea­sure­ments (includ­ing radi­a­tion). Pro­fil­ing sites with green back­ground are exist­ing, with a peach back­ground are planned for VITAL II.  ~100 Radioson­des will be launched on demand in the CB area. UAS Mul­ti­copter pro­fil­ing sites are planned in Sinth­ern dur­ing the IOP between July and August 2026.  Addi­tion­al  ~50 near-sur­face mea­sure­ments of tem­per­a­ture, pres­sure and humid­i­ty will be avail­able from the autonomous cold pool log­ger 2 (APOLLO 2.0) net­work to be set up in the gray-shad­ed areas. The pur­ple oval indi­cates an MTG-S1 IRS pix­el size. IRS cov­er­age is avail­able over the whole domain. Source of the map: Google Maps

VITAL II also extends upon the suc­cess of the FES­ST­VaL, a 2021 field exper­i­ment which focused on the meso-g-scale (2–20km) pro­vid­ing a high-den­si­ty sur­face obser­va­tion net­work paired with con­tin­u­ous, ground-based atmos­pher­ic pro­fil­ing at three dis­tinct loca­tions with­in 6 km of each oth­er. VITAL II will extend pro­fil­ing and dense near-sur­face obser­va­tions to the meso-b-scale (20–200km = region­al scale). Up to 50 sur­face sta­tions of the updat­ed autonomous cold pool log­ger 2 (APOLLO 2.0) will be installed with­in Cologne Bay. The planned obser­va­tion­al set­up, in syn­er­gy with the MTG-S1 mea­sure­ments, will pro­vide impor­tant ele­ments in enhanc­ing our under­stand­ing of the evo­lu­tion of the sta­ble and con­vec­tive ABL as well as con­vec­tive cold pools. The obser­va­tions will be used for assess­ing and improv­ing the Ger­man Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice (DWD) Numer­i­cal Weath­er Pre­dic­tion (NWP) mod­el ICON land sur­face and ABL para­me­ter­i­za­tion schemes. In addi­tion, data assim­i­la­tion exper­i­ments with the nov­el data are planned.

A cur­rent ver­sion of the VITAL II con­cept paper can be found here: 10.5281/zenodo.17424651

For ques­tions to the cam­paign, e.g. con­cern­ing sci­en­tif­ic back­ground, par­tic­i­pa­tion, data avail­abil­i­ty etc. please con­tact ulrich.loehnert@uni-koeln.de