HIRDLS/Aura Level 2 Daily Geophysical Parameters V007 (HIRDLS2) at GES DISC

The "HIRDLS/Aura Level 2 Geophysical Parameters" data product (HIRDLS2) contains an entire day's worth of Level-2 vertical profiles of O3, HNO3, H2O, CFC-11, CFC-12, N2O, NO2, N2O5, ClONO2, temperature, geopotential height, and aerosol extinction at 12.1 and 8.3 microns, as well as cloud top pressure. HIRDLS measured infrared emissions in 21 channels ranging from 6.12 to 17.76 microns in the upper troposphere, stratosphere and mesosphere. Data are available for the ~3 year mission from January 29, 2005 until March 17, 2008. Observations of the Earth's atmosphere were only made from the far azimuth scan (away from sun side) resulting in limited data coverage from +80 to -64 degrees latitude. The useful vertical range of the data depends on the measured species, and are provided on 24 levels per decade of pressure corresponding to about 1 km vertical resolution. The current and final version of this product is 7. Of the original targeted species, only CH4 was not retrieved in this version.

The data are stored in the version 5 Hierarchical Data Format for the Earth Observing System (HDF-EOS5), which is an extension of the HDF5 format. Each file contains a single swath object with one day of data (measured species and species precision), geolocation fields (e.g. time, latitude, longitude, pressure), and swath attributes, along with file level metadata. Each file contains approximately 5600 profile scans.