Summary

Description

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory is the first NASA mission designed to collect space-based measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide with the precision, resolution, and coverage needed to characterize the processes controlling its buildup in the atmosphere. The OCO-2 project uses the LEOStar-2 spacecraft that carries a single instrument. It incorporates three high-resolution spectrometers that make coincident measurements of reflected sunlight in the near-infrared CO2 near 1.61 and 2.06 μm and in molecular oxygen (O2) A-Band at 0.76 μm The three spectrometers have different characteristics and are calibrated independently. Their raw data numbers (DN) are delivered correlated in time to the Level 1B process as Level 1A products. Each band has 1016 spectral elements, although some are masked out in the L2 retrieval. This L1B product results from calibration mode measurements (e.g., Lunar, Solar, Dark observations), and thus it differs from the OCO2_L1B_Science (L1bSc) product. The differences in the product formats are only in the geolocation information provided. Whereas the L1bSc products report geolocation data for each sounding, calibration products report the direction of the boresight vector.