The CloudSat-CALIPSO Cloud Amount Uncertainty product

Version 1.0 of the dataset. The peer-reviewed publication for this dataset has been published in Remote Sensing,  2021, 13(4), 807, and can be accessed here https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13040807. Please cite this when using the dataset.

The ‘CloudSat-CALIPSO Cloud Amount Uncertainty’ product provides information about mean annual and mean monthly cloud amount, at 40 vertical levels (480 m), and four spatial resolutions (1°, 2.5°, 5°, and 10°), as derived from the joint CloudSat-CALIPSO lidar-radar observations (2006–2011). For the very first time, the CloudSat-CALIPSO climatology comes with a quantitative uncertainty assessment - bootstrapped confidence intervals for mean values. The width of confidence intervals is an essential element in studying spatial and/or temporal variation in cloud amount with satellite profiling instruments. Uncertainty data are provided at four confidence levels (85%, 90%, 95%, 99%). Data products are distributed as HDF4 files, and can be accessed under the CC BY 4.0 license at doi:10.5281/zenodo.6113205. See the Product documentation file ( LIRAC.conf.v01_doc01.pdf ) for details.