ACT-America: L2 Remotely Sensed Column-average CO2 by Airborne Lidar, Eastern USA

This dataset provides Level 2 (L2) remotely sensed column-average carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations measured during airborne campaigns in Summer 2016, Winter 2017, Fall 2017, and Spring 2018 conducted over central and eastern regions of the United States for the Atmospheric Carbon and Transport (ACT-America) project. Column-average CO2 concentrations were measured at 0.1 second frequency during flights of the C-130 Hercules aircraft at altitudes up to 8 km with a Multi-functional Fiber Laser Lidar (MFLL; Harris Corporation). The MFLL is a set of Continuous-Wave (CW) lidar instruments consisting of an intensity modulated multi-frequency single-beam synchronous-detection Laser Absorption Spectrometer (LAS) operating at 1571 nm for measuring the column amount of CO2 number density and range between the aircraft and the surface or to cloud tops, and surface reflectance and a Pseudo-random Noise (PN) altimeter at 1596 nm for measuring the path length from the aircraft to the scattering surface and/or cloud tops. The MFLL was onboard all ACT-America seasonal campaigns, except Summer 2019. Complete aircraft flight information, interpolated to the 0.1 second column CO2 reporting frequency, are included, but not limited to, latitude, longitude, altitude, and attitude. Processing for this Level 2 (L2) product included additional processing and calibration procedures described in this document as applied to retrieval of column CO2 from L1 MFLL data. Data users should use this L2 data unless different CO2 retrieval criteria are preferred.