TES/Aura L2 Atmospheric Temperatures Nadir Special Observation V007

TL2TNS_7 is the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES)/Aura Level 2 Atmospheric Temperatures Nadir Special Observation Version 7 data product. TES was an instrument aboard NASA's Aura satellite and was launched from California on July 15, 2004. Data collection for TES is complete. This product contains atmospheric vertical profile estimates and associated errors (diagonals and covariance matrices), along with retrieved surface temperature, cloud effective optical depth, column estimates, quality flags, averaging kernels and priori constraint vectors. TES Level 2 data contain retrieved species (or temperature) profiles at the observation targets and the estimated errors. The geolocation, quality, and other data (e.g., surface characteristics for nadir observations) were also provided. L2 modeled spectra were evaluated using radiative transfer modeling algorithms. The process, referred to as retrieval, compared observed spectra to the modeled spectra and iteratively updated the atmospheric parameters. L2 standard product files included information for one molecular species (or temperature) for an entire global survey or special observation run. A global survey consisted of a maximum of 16 consecutive orbits.