AIRS/Aqua L3 5-day Quantization in Physical Units (AIRS+AMSU) 5 degrees x 5 degrees V006 (AIRX3QP5) at GES DISC

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) is a grating spectrometer (R = 1200) aboard the second Earth Observing System (EOS) polar-orbiting platform, EOS Aqua. In combination with the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) and the Humidity Sounder for Brazil (HSB), AIRS constitutes an innovative atmospheric sounding group of visible, infrared, and microwave sensors.
The quantization products (QP) are distributional summaries derived from the Level-2 standard retrieval
products (of swath type) to provide a more comprehensive set of statistical summaries than the traditional means and standard deviation.
The QP products combine the Level 2 standard data parameters over grid
cells of 5 x 5 deg spatial extent for temporal periods of five days from -180.0 to +180.0 deg longitude and from -90.0 to +90.0 deg latitude.
For each grid map of 4-byte floating-point mean values there is a corresponding 4-byte floating-point map of standard deviation and a 2-byte integer grid map of counts. The counts map provides the user with the number of points per bin that were included in the mean and can be used to generate custom multi-day maps from the daily gridded products. The thermodynamic parameters are: Skin Temperature (land and sea surface), Air Temperature at the surface, Profiles of Air Temperature and Water Vapor, Tropopause Characteristics, Column Precipitable Water, Cloud Amount/Frequency, Cloud Height, Cloud Top Pressure, Cloud Top Temperature, Reflectance, Emissivity, Surface Pressure, Cloud Vertical Distribution. The trace gases parameters are: Total Amounts and Vertical Profiles of Carbon Monoxide, Methane, and Ozone. The actual names of the variables in the data files should be inferred from the Processing File Description document.