Space Station Lidar Profiles of Clouds and Aerosols

CATS-ISS_L2O_D-M7.2-V3-01_05kmLay provides vertical profiles of atmospheric aerosols and clouds at 60-meter vertical and 5-kilometer horizontal resolution. This Level 2 Operational data product was collected by the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS) lidar instrument aboard the International Space Station. The collection spans from March 25, 2015, to October 29, 2017.

Use Cases

• Analyze diurnal changes in cloud properties by comparing backscatter profiles from the same geographic location at different observation times.
• Study aerosol layer heights and optical depths using the vertical profile data at three distinct wavelengths.
• Validate and improve climate models by comparing simulated cloud and aerosol vertical structures against the 5 km horizontal resolution layer data.
• Investigate long-range aerosol transport patterns using the time-series of geophysical parameters across the instrument's orbital path.

Strengths

• Provides unique diurnal observations of the same Earth location from space, a first for lidar-based studies.
• Offers high-resolution vertical profiles at 60m resolution from an orbital platform between 230 and 270 miles altitude.

Limitations

• Data collection ended in October 2017, limiting analysis to a specific 2.5-year historical period.
• The 5 km horizontal resolution may be coarse for studying small-scale atmospheric phenomena.

Provenance

Source

Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS) lidar instrument on the International Space Station.

Collection Method

Lidar remote sensing providing range-resolved profile measurements.

Time Range

2015-03-25 to 2017-10-29

Freshness

Data collection is historical, ending on 2017-10-29.

Geography

Global coverage between approximately 51-degree orbital inclination.