HURRICANE AND SEVERE STORM SENTINEL (HS3) GLOBAL HAWK CLOUD PHYSICS LIDAR (CPL) V1

The Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) Global Hawk Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL) dataset includes measurements gathered by the CPL instrument during the HS3 campaign which took place during the hurricane seasons of 2011 through 2014 in the Atlantic Ocean basin region. Goals for HS3 included: assessing the relative roles of large-scale environment and storm-scale internal processes; and addressing the controversial role of the Saharan Air Layer (SAL) in tropical storm formation and intensification as well as the role of deep convection in the inner-core region of storms. The CPL instrument returns information on the radiative and optical properties of cirrus clouds and aerosols at a high temporal and spatial resolution. CPL uses the 355, 532, and 1064 nm channels and has a small field of view, which eliminates multiple scattering; it offers 30 m vertical resolution and 200 m horizontal resolution. The CPL instrument measures the total (aerosol plus Rayleigh) attenuated backscatter as a function of altitude at each wavelength. Data is available in netCDF/CF format, from 2012 - 2014.