CATS-ISS: Atmospheric Cloud and Aerosol Profiles from Space Lidar, 2015-2017

NASA's Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS) instrument on the International Space Station collected vertical profile measurements of clouds and aerosols from March 25, 2015 to October 29, 2017. The lidar instrument operated at three wavelengths, orbiting between approximately 230 and 270 miles above Earth's surface with a 51-degree inclination. This Level 2 Operational data product provides geophysical parameters at 60-meter vertical and 5-kilometer horizontal resolution.

Use Cases

• Modeling diurnal cloud changes based on observations of the same Earth location at different times each day
• Analyzing vertical aerosol profiles based on range-resolved lidar measurements at three wavelengths
• Studying cloud properties based on high-resolution (60m vertical, 5km horizontal) atmospheric profile data

Strengths

• Provides vertical profiles at three wavelengths, a feature unique for space-based lidar at the time
• Data spans from March 25, 2015 to October 29, 2017, covering over two years of observations
• Offers 60-meter vertical and 5-kilometer horizontal resolution for detailed atmospheric analysis

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale ML tasks

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Derived from Level 1 data collected by the CATS lidar instrument on the International Space Station

Time Range

March 25, 2015 to October 29, 2017

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 05:50:37.175936; freshness should be verified

Geography

Global coverage from ISS orbit between ~230 and ~270 miles altitude at 51-degree inclination