The science guiding the \EURECA campaign and its measurements are presented. \EURECA comprised roughly five weeks of measurements in the downstream winter trades of the North Atlantic — eastward and south-eastward of Barbados. Through its ability to characterize processes operating across a wide range of scales, \EURECA marked a turning point in our ability to observationally study factors influencing clouds in the trades, how they will respond to warming, and their link to other components of the earth system, such as upper-ocean processes or, or the life-cycle of particulate matter. This characterization was made possible by thousands (2500) of sondes distributed to measure circulations on meso (200 km) and larger (500 km) scales, roughly four hundred hours of flight time by four heavily instrumented research aircraft, four global-ocean class research vessels, an advanced ground-based cloud observatory, a flotilla of autonomous or tethered measurement devices operating in the upper ocean (nearly 10000 profiles), lower atmosphere (continuous profiling), and along the air-sea interface, a network of water stable isotopologue measurements, complemented by special programmes of satellite remote sensing and modeling with a new generation of weather/climate models. In addition to providing an outline of the novel measurements and their composition into a unified and coordinated campaign, the six distinct scientific facets that \EURECA explored — from Brazil Ring Current Eddies to turbulence induced clustering of cloud droplets and its influence on warm-rain formation — are presented along with an overview \EURECA’s outreach activities, environmental impact, and guidelines for scientific practice.

This paper focuses on the accuracy of longwave radiation flux retrievals at the top and bottom of the atmosphere at Eureka station, Canada, in the high Arctic. We report comparisons between seven products derived from (1) calculations based on a combination of ground-based and space-based lidar and radar observations, (2) standard radiometric observations from the CERES satellite, (3) direct observations at the surface from a broadband radiation station and (4) the ERA-Interim and ERA5 reanalyses. Statistical, independent analyses are first performed to look at recurring bias and trends in fluxes at Top and Bottom of the Atmosphere. The analysis is further refined comparing fluxes derived from coincident observations decomposed by scene types. Results show that radiative transfer calculations using ground-based lidar-radar profiles derived at Eureka agree well with TOA LW fluxes observed by CERES and with BOA LW fluxes reference. CloudSat-CALIPSO also show good agreement with calculations from ground-based sensor observations, with a relatively small bias. This bias is shown to be largely due to low and thick cloud occurrences that the satellites are insensitive to owing to attenuation from clouds above and surface clutter. These conditions of opaque low clouds, cause an even more pronounced bias for CERES BOA flux calculation in winter, due to the deficit of low clouds identified by MODIS. ERA-I and ERA5 fluxes behave differently, the large positive bias observed with ERA-I is much reduced in ERA5. ERA5 is closer to reference observations due to a better behaviour of low and mid-level clouds.