CALIPSO Lidar Level 3 Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Cloud, Standard V1-00

CAL_LID_L3_GEWEX_Cloud-Standard-V1-00 is the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) Lidar Level 3 Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Cloud, Standard Version 1-00 data product. Data for this product was collected using the CALIPSO Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) instrument. Data collection for this product is complete. This product is a reformatted version of the CALIPSO contribution to the GEWEX cloud assessment of global cloud datasets from satellites. The data submitted by the CALIPSO team for this project had to conform to a specific format: yearly netCDF files organized by parameter. To be compatible with another publicly orderable lidar level 3 CALIPSO aerosol and cloud products reported as monthly HDF files, this new lidar level 3 CALIPSO GEWEX cloud product was created. These files report global distributions of cloud amount and cloud top as averages and histograms on a uniform 2-dimensional (2D) spatial grid. All level 3 parameters are derived from the CALIPSO version 4. x Level 2, 5 km cloud merged layer products, with a temporal averaging of one month. CALIPSO was launched on April 28, 2006, to study the impact of clouds and aerosols on the Earth's radiation budget and climate. It flies in the international A-Train constellation for coincident Earth observations. The CALIPSO satellite comprises three instruments: CALIOP, Imaging Infrared Radiometer (IIR), and Wide Field Camera (WFC). CALIPSO is a joint satellite mission between NASA and the French Agency CNES (Centre National D’Etudes Spatiales).