Atmospheric wind field is a crucial element in meteorology and a primary driving factor for global carbon cycling, aerosol transport, energy exchange, and weather changes. Although satellite-based atmospheric observations have a history of several decades, progress in measuring the global 3D wind field has been slow. A clear need for improving this situation is to establish a globally covered, high-resolution atmospheric wind observation system. Currently, the primary observation method for wind profiles is by using radiosondes, but it is impossible to obtain corresponding sounding data for regions where instruments are difficult to install and maintain, such as oceans or deserts. Therefore, wind measurement in these regions is usually performed by carrying sounding instruments on flights or ships, which is costly and subject to the conditions of detection. Satellite-based Doppler wind lidars can achieve wide-range, high-precision, and uninterrupted wind field measurements, which are not affected by terrain and time compared with ground-based and airborne detection. Satellite-based wind measurement is of great significance for improving numerical weather forecast accuracy, long-term climate research, pollutant transport, and environmental protection. Research on satellite-based Doppler wind lidars has been underway for nearly 30 years since the last century, and Aeolus is currently the only successfully launched satellite for satellite-based wind measurement.In the 1980s, research on laser radar technology was conducted in space, followed by some research on coherent wind measurement in the 1990s. However, due to its technical difficulty, it has not been successfully applied so far. In the 1990s, the ADM-Aeolus project was proposed. Starting in 2000, EADS-Astrium, a subsidiary of the European Aerospace and Defense Group, and more than 30 European companies jointly conducted research and development on the ALADIN payload principle prototype (Fig.2). In 2001, ESA developed a direct-detection lidar simulator for the ADM-Aeolus instrument. The simulator has a resolution of 15 m and incorporates the latest design of ALADIN in real-time. Before the official launch, ESA conducted six airborne testing activities to observe atmospheric wind profiles for various atmospheric scenarios (Tab.2) and to test, verify, optimize the data quality control algorithm, evaluate the measurement error of line-of-sight wind speed, and propose a series of data inversion optimization schemes for different situations. Aeolus was successfully launched in France in August 2018.This paper summarizes the main data verification activities and results of the Aeolus satellite since its launch. Until April 2022, the global random error of the L2 B data product for the Rayleigh channel is about 6 m/s and for the Mie channel is about 3.3 m/s. However, in long-term experiments, the L2 A product has significant errors in the backscatter coefficient under 2 km due to cloud interference and other factors including but not limited to low laser emission energy, calibration defects, and fluctuations in thermal pixels. This paper focuses on the practical application of the Aeolus data product and quantifies the improvement of numerical weather forecast accuracy, advancement of atmospheric dynamics research, and progress on pollutant and environmental research. Based on the Aeolus design, parameter optimization and simulation were conducted, and the simulation results were presented. Finally, the data characteristics of Aeolus were analyzed, and seven factors that need improvement were proposed based on China's research progress in satellite-based wind measurement and wind measurement requirements in the meteorological field, including laser emission energy, data inversion, and equipment development. The paper also analyzed the characteristics of coherent lidar wind measurement and hybrid lidar wind measurement schemes. Among them, the hybrid lidar wind measurement scheme has advantages in the accuracy and quantity of the detection data, and can be considered as the main direction for China's future development of satellite-based wind measurement.