SBUV/Nimbus-7 Level 2 Daily Ozone Profile and Total Column from CD-ROM V008 (SBUVN7O3) at GES DISC

The version 8 SBUV Nimbus-7 ozone data were first released at the 2004 Quadrennial Ozone Symposium on DVD. The DVD contained all of the SBUV/2 data from NOAA-9, NOAA-11 and NOAA-16 satellites as well as SBUV data from the Nimbus-7 satellite. The DVD is no longer available, however all the data are available on-line from the NASA GES DISC. The Nimbus-7 SBUV v8 data are available from 1978-10-31 to 1990-06-21. The instrument spatial resolution is 180 km x 180 km footprint at nadir. The ozone profiles are made at 21 pressure levels between 1000 and 0.1 hPa. Each data file contains a days worth of ozone measurements, and is written in an ASCII text format.

The SBUV measures incoming solar irradiance and radiance backscattered by the atmosphere at 12 wavelengths in the UV range [0.25-0.34 micrometer] with a spectral band pass of 0.001 micrometer. The wavelength channels used for ozone retrievals for SBUV were: 256, 273, 283, 288, 292, 298, 302, 306, 312, 318, 331, and 340 nm. Radiation at these wavelengths are absorbed by ozone, such that the difference between the incoming and outgoing radiation can be related to the amount of ozone in the atmosphere.

The SBUV consists of a double Ebert-Fastie spectrometer and a filter photometer similar to the BUV on Nimbus 4. The bandwidth of the photometer is about 3 nm and the spectral resolution for SBUV monochromator is 1.1 nm.