CALIPSO Lidar Level 3 Stratospheric Aerosol Profiles Standard V1-01

CAL_LID_L3_Stratospheric_APro-Standard-V1-01 is the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) Lidar Level 3 Stratospheric Aerosol Profiles Standard Version 1-01 data product. This data product was collected using the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) instrument. The version of this product was changed from 1-00 to 1-01 to account for a change in the operating system of the CALIPSO production cluster. Data collection for this product is ongoing.

The CALIPSO Lidar Level 3 stratospheric aerosol reports global distributions of 532nm total attenuated backscatter, extinction, attenuated scattering ratios, and stratospheric aerosol optical depths on a uniform spatial grid. All level 3 parameters are derived from the CALIPSO version 4 level 1 and level 2 5 km merged layer and version 3 level 2 polar stratospheric cloud data products, with a temporal averaging of one month. The primary outputs are reported in terms of 1) background only and 2) all aerosol. All features identified by the level 2 algorithms have been removed for background only. Only aerosol layers are considered for all aerosols, while clouds and polar stratospheric clouds are removed.

CALIPSO was launched on April 28, 2006, and continues to collect data necessary to study the impact of clouds and aerosols on the Earth's radiation budget and climate. It flies in the international A-Train constellation for coincident Earth observations. The CALIPSO satellite comprises three instruments: CALIOP, Imaging Infrared Radiometer (IIR), and Wide Field Camera (WFC). CALIPSO is a joint satellite mission between NASA and the French Agency CNES (Centre national d'études spatiales).