AIRS/Aqua L3 Monthly CO2 in the free troposphere (AIRS+AMSU) 2.5 degrees x 2 degrees V005 (AIRX3C2M) at GES DISC

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) is a grating spectrometer (R = 1200) aboard the second Earth Observing System (EOS) polar-orbiting platform, EOS Aqua. In combination with the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) and the Humidity Sounder for Brazil (HSB), AIRS constitutes an innovative atmospheric sounding group of visible, infrared, and microwave sensors. This product is the AIRS mid-tropospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Level 3 Monthly Gridded Retrieval, from the AIRS and AMSU instruments on board of Aqua satellite. It is monthly gridded data at 2.5x2 deg (lon)x(lat) grid cell size. The data is in mole fraction units (data x 10^6 =ppm in volume). This quantity is not a total column quantity because the sensitivity function of the AIRS mid-tropospheric CO2 retrieval system peaks over the altitude range 6-10 km. The quantity is what results when the true atmospheric CO2 profile is weighted, level-by-level, by the AIRS sensitivity function. The file format is HDF-EOS 2.12 corresponding to HDF4. This AIRS mid-tropospheric CO2 Level 3 Monthly Gridded Retrieval Product contains standard retrieval means, standard deviations and input counts as well as the latitude and longitude arrays giving the centers of the grid boxes. Each file covers a calendar month. The mean values are simply the arithmetic means of the individual CO2 retrievals which fall within that grid box over the month. The mid-tropospheric CO2 retrievals have been averaged and binned into 2.5 x 2 deg grid cells, from -180.0 to +180.0 deg longitude and from -60.0 to +90.0 deg latitude. For each grid map of 4-byte floating-point mean values there is a corresponding 4-byte floating-point map of standard deviation and a 2-byte integer grid map of counts. The counts map provides the user with the number of points per bin that were included in the mean.