PREFIRE_SAT2_AUX-MET: Polar Satellite Auxiliary Meteorology

Global data, with the greatest concentration in the polar regions, provides auxiliary meteorological variables for the PREFIRE mission's second CubeSat. The dataset contains surface and skin temperatures, land fraction, sea ice concentration, snow cover, pressure and wind profiles, and surface type, derived from GEOS-IT analyses and VIIRS satellite data. Its primary purpose is to fill knowledge gaps in the polar far-infrared radiation budget for assimilation into global circulation and climate models.

Use Cases

• Assimilating polar surface conditions (e.g., skin temperature, snow cover) into global climate models to improve future predictions.
• Analyzing sea ice concentration and land fraction trends in polar regions to study cryospheric changes.
• Validating atmospheric profiles (temperature, pressure, wind velocity, O3) from the PREFIRE spectrometer against model analyses.
• Studying the spatial variability of surface type and related meteorological parameters across eight distinct orbital tracks.

Strengths

• Provides high temporal resolution data at 0.707-second intervals.
• Offers specific spatial metrics: an initial swath width of ~264 km with eight scene footprints of 11.8 km x 34.8 km.
• Focuses on the critically under-sampled far-infrared spectrum (5 to 53 µm) for polar emissions.
• Cross-platform presence on NASA Earthdata and Data.gov signals its importance and curation.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are unavailable across all sources.
• The spatial footprint size is dynamic and will decrease over time as the satellite orbit altitude decays.
• The license is ambiguously listed as 'other-license-specified' without explicit details.

Provenance

Source

NASA/LARC_CLOUD, from the PREFIRE-SAT2 CubeSat carrying the TIRS-PREFIRE spectrometer.

Collection Method

Subsets and interpolations of GEOS-IT model analyses and VIIRS satellite data, corresponding to the PREFIRE-TIRS instrument's collection.

Time Range

Science data retrieval started June 29, 2024 and is ongoing.

Freshness

2026-04-09 23:07:29.544356

Geography

Global, with greatest concentration in the polar regions.