Airborne-Scanning Microwave Limb Sounder (A-SMLS) April 2025 flight data

README for Airborne-Scanning Microwave Limb Sounder (A-SMLS) data Nathaniel Livesey, Luis Millán, Frank (Fred) Winiberg, Adrian Tang,Subash Khanal, Jacob Kooi, Tim Crawford, Goutam Chattopadhyay. JetPropulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology Introduction This file describes the information in the August 2025 public release offlight data from the Airborne-Scanning Microwave Limb Sounder (A-SMLS)instruments taken during early April 2025. This public release is intended mainly for external archiving purposesand to be of potential interest for a limited audience. Documentation isminimal, but a peer-reviewed publication describing the instrument andthese data (though not in exhaustive detail) is planned (but notguaranteed given funding and other uncertainties). Level 0 data The Level 0 files contain all the raw telemetry for a contiguous periodof A-SMLS instrument activation (in the lab, mounted on the plane on theground, or during a flight period). These are mostly ASCII files givingwhat amounts to logging information from different processes runningconcurrently on the on-board computer. The radiance count information isin a binary format. The file names are all timestamped with the periodof operation (in US Pacific time). Level 1 data The Level 1 A, B, and C data represent varying degrees of processing ofthe Level 0 data. These are all stored in NetCDF. L1A is essentially are-packaging of the Level 0 data (with some additional temporallyinterpolated fields). L1B adds more information (repeating the L1Ainformation for ease of use), with L1C providing the final calibratedradiances (again, repeating the L1A and L1B information). Supporting software The software that generates the L1 files is part of the “Python suitefor retrievals and analysis of microwave limb sounding data” suite thatis in the process of being released as open source software by JPL.(Currently, the only package released as part of this is the, not reallydirectly related, dualpy package. Further packages are planned forrelease.) Acknowledgements The research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the NationalAeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004).