Summary

Description

The HRIRN3IM data product contains scanned negatives of photofacsimile 70mm film strips from the Nimbus-3 High-Resolution Infrared Radiometer. The images contain orbital daytime (0.7 to 1.3 microns) and nighttime (3.4 to 4.2 microns) cloud cover of the Earth's surface temperature. Each orbital swath picture is gridded with geographic coordinates and covers a distance approximately from the south pole to the north pole (day) and the north pole to the south pole (night). The images are saved as JPEG 2000 digital files. About 7 days of images are archived into a TAR file. The processing techniques used to produce the data set and a full description of the data are contained in section 3.4.1 of the "Nimbus III Users' Guide." The High Resolution Infrared Radiometer (HRIR) was designed to perform two major functions: first to map the Earth's cloud cover at night to complement the television coverage during the daytime portion of the orbit, and second to measure the temperature of cloud tops and terrain features. The HRIR instrument was launched on the Nimbus-3 satellite and was operational from April 22, 1969 through January 31, 1970.These images can be used to supplement the radiance data files from the HRIRN3L2 data product.