Cloud-Aerosol LIDAR and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO): Data Description and Quality Summary, Wide Field Camera Level 1B 1km Data

The primary Wide Field Camera (WFC) Level 1B data products are calibrated radiance and bidirectional reflectance registered to an Earth-based grid centered on the Lidar ground track. During the normal operation, the WFC acquires science data only during the daylight portions of the CALIPSO orbits. For each orbit, three different data files are produced: 1 km Native Science grid, 125 m Native Science grid, and 1 km Registered Science grid. The 1 km Native Science grid covers the full 61 km swath centered on the Lidar track. The 125 m Native Science grid contains only the central 5 km wide high resolution portion of the WFC swath. The 1 km Registered Science grid provides WFC data on the identical grid as the CALIPSO IIR data and is produced to facilitate the use of the WFC data in the IIR retrievals. In addition to radiance and reflectance grids, the WFC Level 1 data products include two parameters that quantify the homogeneity of the cross track image frames: swath homogeneity and track homogeneity.

There are also two intermediate WFC Level 1B data products: Assembler and Calibration. The calibration data product contains geolocated nighttime digital count data. The calibration data is collected over a 25-second segment on the dark side of every orbit. The assembler data products contain geolocated nighttime daily digital count and daily statistical data which comes from the calibration product. The assembler algorithm takes the calibration data and calculates the statistics for each pixel (mean, standard deviation, maximum, and minimum).

This document will focus on the 1 km Native Science grid data product.