I’m Marco Coppola, at the second year of PhD at Politecnico di Torino, my background is space related with a master’s degree in aerospace engineering. I’m currently working in the WIVERN scientific team under the lead of Professor Alesandro Battaglia; WIVERN is a scientific mission selected as the next Earth Explorer (EE11) program by ESA, its current development phase is B1. WIVERN will be the first space-based mission to provide in-cloud winds and hence contribute to filling the gap in the current WMO Global Observing System to the benefit of NWP and climate research. WIVERN will also provide high-resolution reflectivity profiles of rain, snow and ice water, which can be used to achieve a better quantification of the Earth’s hydrological cycle and energy budgets, given the significant reduction in sampling errors compared to current and future cloud radar missions. My role in the team is to provide scientific results in key weather systems observation from simulated WIVERN overpasses and to validate the current understanding of major weather systems and hydrometeor characteristics in the state of the art models (like WRF and ICON).

In my first year I published a paper called “Improved hydrometeor detection near the Earth’s surface by a conically scanning spaceborne W-band radar” about the assessment of WIVERN performance in detecting hydrometeors in low altitude systems, comparing it with current in orbit platforms, like CloudSat and EarthCare.

I’m now working on a paper in review (Peering inside tropical cyclones with the WIVERN space-borne Doppler radar) and another one to come about the 3-D reconstruction of the ice mass field in detrained cloud anvils from Deep Convective Systems (DCS) and hurricanes. This capability in the future Numerical Weather Prediction is of the utmost importance for the overcoming of uncertainties in the earth radiative budget, relevant for the assessment of the impacts of climate change.

My future work will focus on the synergy between geostationary passive and WIVERN active radar products to improve the tracking and the 3D reconstruction evolution in time of DCS.

Click here for more information and here to view my poster.