Published By National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Issued about 9 years ago
Summary
Description
This is the MERRA IAU 2d surface and TOA radiation fluxes subset, collocated with the CloudSat track. The subset is processed at the Modeling and Assimilation Data and Information Services Center (MDISC) of the GES DISC, NASA. The algorithm first calculates coordinates along the CloudSat ground track as well as coordinates orthogonal to the CloudSat ground track to produce a swath co-instantiated with actual CloudSat coverage. The algorithm proceeds to extract the closest MERRA grid cell at each point within the co-instantiated swath and writes the output subset in HDF-EOS swath-format, one subset for each time stride for 24 subsets per day. The swath has an along-track temporal resolution of 10 seconds and an across-track spatial resolution of 0.25 degrees. With 9 across-track bins, the resulting coverage is about 200km wide. All original parameters are preserved in the subset. As it is collocated with CloudSat, the subset is automatically collocated with CALIPSO as well.