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The Earth System Observatory (ESO) is NASA’s response to the recommendations of the 2017 Earth Sciences Decadal Survey conducted by the US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The ESO is being conceived as a set of fully integrated missions addressing 4 main Earth science focus areas including aerosols, clouds, convection and precipitation (jointly re-ferred to as AOS, the Atmosphere Observing System). ESO ground breaking observations will provide critical measurements to address societally relevant problems in climate change, natural hazard mitiga-tion, fighting forest fires, and improving real-time agricultural processes. A critical element of the AOS observing strategy is to make extensive use of new passive and active sen-sors as well as of the so-called Program-of-Record (PoR), complemented by a fully integrated sub-orbital component. In order to achieve maximum benefit, all these observations need to be integrated into comprehensive observing and modeling/data assimilation systems. Such an approach requires compre-hensive model-data synthesis capabilities that needs to be conceived in conjunction with the space-based and suborbital components of AOS. In this presentation we will summarize the major science goals of AOS including cloud feedbacks, at-mospheric convection, emphasizing aerosol processes and aerosol radiative effects, and the synergistic aspects of clouds-precipitation-aerosol interactions. We will describe examples of the observing system simulation capabilities being developed for AOS, including global storm resolving nature runs, detailed instrument and retrieval simulators, as well as fast retrieval emulators for instrumenting climate models. This simulation environment, being developed under NASA’s open-source science initiative, will permit us to explore how AOS data will be used across space and time to better initialize forecasts and train modeling systems, and to infuse models and data assimilation systems with AOS data, well before launch.