Numerical Model Generated Hawaii Test Scenes for EarthCARE Pre-launch Studies - Part 1: Atmospheric and Surface Properties

This first part of the dataset contains the atmospheric and surface conditions of Hawaii test scene (39320E) used for pre-launch studies of EarthCARE’s retrieval algorithms and data management system. The data are produced by Environment and Climate Change Canada's Global Environmental Multi-scale (GEM) NWP model (Côté et al., 1998, Girard et al., 2014). The surface albedo climatology is based MODIS’s MCD43GF 1 km resolution bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) product for the period 2002 to 2013 (Schaaf et al. 2002). Please refer to the second part of Hawaii scene dataset for the mass content and effective radius of hydrometeors and aerosols, and the third part of the dataset for the number concentration of hydrometeors and aerosols, as well as the data of vertical wind speed.

The Hawaii test frame is 6200 km long and 200 km wide with horizontal grid-spacing of 250 km and 57 vertical layers. The simulation is initialized at 12:00 UTC 23-Jun-2015 and saved at 00h00 UTC on 24-Jun-2015. This frame crosses the central Pacific Ocean, near Hawaii, with a mesoscale convective system (MCS) in its center, clear skies in the north and south part of the frame, and a weak frontal system at its southern extremity.