This post lists the notable EECLAT activities that took place after the submissions of the 2018 proposal, and is extracted from the 2019 proposal.

Thanks to funding for scientific animation by multiple sponsors (OPGC, OVSQ, LA, INSU, IPSL, Labex-CaPPa and CNES), the EECLAT project held its 7th annual scientific workshop from January 21st to 23rd, 2019 in Fréjus. All scientific presentations are available online . Nearly 50 French participants from involved laboratories (including post-docs and PhD students) presented their results, exchanged ideas, discussed future projects and organised upcoming activities on research topics. A call by C. Stubenrauch led to EECLAT members joining the Trishna Atmosphere working group led by J.P. Lagouarde (INRA). A report describing the contents of the workshop was sent to all sponsors in March and is available online . Our previous 2018 workshop was the subject of an article published in BAMS (Luebke et al., 2018).

Following recommendations from INSU during that workshop, several members of EECLAT (V. Noel, M. Chiriaco, S. Cloché) are building a Groupe de Recherche (GDR) around its scientific objectives, with the help of leaders of scientific themes, INSU and CNES. This GDR will propose a formalized structure to organize and prioritize the scientific questions investigated by the research activities described in the present project. We hope that this framework will also enable the pursuit of other funding opportunities, including recurring support for our annual workshop.

ADM-Aeolus was successfully launched in August 2018 and successfully measured its first vertical profiles of horizontal wind speed. A. Dabas (CNRM) reported on these results and on the general progress of the mission and products during the January 2019 EECLAT workshop. An AERIS project was kicked off in late 2018 to automate the mirroring of ADM-Aeolus data on French servers to make its use easier by the French community.

Several members of EECLAT participated in the ESA Earth-CARE science workshop (June 11-15, 2018), in the ESA ADM-Aeolus cal-val and scientific workshop (March 26-29, 2019), in the ESA Atmos conference (November 26-29, 2018) and in the ESA living planet symposium (May 13-17, 2019). These were opportunities to strengthen the planned French activities for the cal-val and scientific exploitation of ADM-Aeolus and Earth-CARE. In 2018 seven French proposals were accepted by ESA as Earth-CARE cal-val activities, and all associated teams were invited to attend the Earth-CARE workshop on non-ESA funding. Several members of EECLAT participated in the NASA A-CCP kick-off meeting in Pasadena, USA (April 2-4). They presented the activities of the French community (particularly the MESCAL group) relevant to the design of the planned NASA A-CCP spaceborne lidar/radar mission. This meeting was generally perceived as very constructive. In France, a separate proposal for MESCAL Phase A1 activities was submitted in late 2018 to CNES for review by the French MESCAL group.

Several airborne field campaigns took place in 2018-2019 involving EECLAT participants, EXAEDRE in Corsica, AEOLUS Cal/Val in May around Toulouse area and the airborne AFLUX campaign in Svalbard from 15 March to 16 April 2019. EPATAN-NAWDEX data have been delivered to ESA in order to contribute to the evaluation of the L2 products before launch.