Aeolus orbit

ESA’s Aeolus wind satellite flies in a polar, Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 320 km. It takes 90 minutes to complete one orbit around Earth and seven days to cover the globe.  Aeolus is the first space mission to acquire profiles of the wind on a global scale. These near-realtime observations will improve the accuracy of numerical weather and climate prediction and advance our understanding of tropical dynamics and processes relevant to climate variability.