C3IEL

The Asher Space Research Institute (ASRI) at the Technion is leading the Israeli contribution to the innovative French-Israeli C3IEL (Cluster for Cloud evolution, ClImatE and Lightning) space mission. This ground-breaking project aims to provide unprecedented insights into convective clouds at high spatial and temporal resolutions. C3IEL will employ two nanosatellites equipped with advanced imaging instruments to study cloud dynamics, water vapor interactions, and lightning activity at scales close to individual convective eddies. The mission promises to bridge critical observational gaps, offering new data on cloud evolution, their role in redistributing energy and water in the atmosphere, and the relationship between storm intensity and lightning frequency.

C3IEL mission is an interdisciplinary, day and night, clear and cloudy skies observation and measurement system, based on three distributed multi instrumental nanosatellites. The system includes a train of two (or three) nanosatellites, designed and built on the CubeSat standard. These 6U nanosatellites carry the payloads. During the mission, the nanosatellites will operate synchronously as a concerted distributed instrumentation system and perform identical types of measurements while pointing at the same ground pixel.

The goals of the mission are:

• To quantify – for the first time – the competing roles of cloud updrafts aerosols on clouds’ radiative effects and their influence on climate.
• To document the 3-dimensional structure of Water Vapor distribution at the vicinity of clouds and the interactions with cloud dynamic evolution.
• To observe and map the relationships and synergy of lightning with convective clouds cloud updrafts during thunderstorms, with the synchronized instrumentation of clouds and lightning.

The resulting scientific products will be significantly better in understanding the leverage clouds have on weather, thunderstorms and climate, thus leading to improved forecasts and significant reduction in uncertainties of manmade impacts in comprehending climate changes.

The nanosatellites of C3IEL system will be engaged in the scientific clouds experiment, i.e. in stereoscopic imaging of cloud tops with VIS cameras, to study the evolution of convective cloud updrafts, tracking their evolution with time. The novelty of a distributed instrumentation set results in a synergic picture of the observed phenomena of clouds properties, i.e., cloud evolution and electrification processes and their interactions with the ambient 3-diemsional distribution of water vapor.