TES/Aura L2 HDO Limb Special Observation: Atmospheric Vertical Profiles

Atmospheric vertical profile estimates and associated errors from the TES instrument on NASA's Aura satellite. The dataset includes retrieved surface temperature, cloud effective optical depth, column estimates, quality flags, averaging kernels, and a priori constraint vectors. It was last updated by the LARC_CLOUD organization on 2006-05-20.

Use Cases

• Validate atmospheric chemistry models based on vertical profile estimates.
• Study the distribution and transport of water vapor isotopologues (HDO) based on column estimates.
• Analyze cloud properties and their impact on retrievals based on cloud effective optical depth.
• Assess retrieval uncertainty and perform error propagation based on provided covariance matrices and averaging kernels.

Strengths

• Includes detailed error characterization with diagonal and covariance matrices.
• Provides auxiliary data for interpretation, including averaging kernels and a priori constraints.

Limitations

• Last updated 2006-05-20 05:50:21.532000; freshness should be verified.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

NASA Aura satellite, TES instrument.

Collection Method

Satellite remote sensing limb observations.

Time Range

Specific observation date(s) not provided in metadata.

Freshness

2006-05-20

Geography

Global coverage from satellite orbit.