TROPICS06 L2A Unified Resolution Brightness Temperatures V1.0

The "Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats" (TROPICS) mission has a goal of providing nearly all-weather observations of three-dimensional temperature and humidity, as well as cloud ice and precipitation horizontal structure, at high temporal resolution to conduct high-value science investigations of tropical cyclones. The mission comprises a constellation of five identical Space Vehicles (SVs) conforming to the 3U form factor and hosting a passive microwave spectrometer payload.

Each SV hosts an identical high-performance spectrometer named the TROPICS Millimeter-wave Sounder (TMS) that will provide temperature profiles using seven channels near the 118.75-GHz oxygen absorption line, water vapor profiles using three channels near the 183-GHz water vapor absorption line, imagery in a single channel near 90 GHz for precipitation measurements (when combined with higher resolution water vapor channels), and a single channel near 205 GHz that is more sensitive to cloud-sized ice particles.

This dataset is from the TROPICS06 satellite, as the Validated Stage-1 version of the Level 2A geolocated brightness temperature with the water vapor sounding channels (Ch. 9 to 12) converted from their native G-band resolution to the temperature sounding channel (F-band) native resolution (i.e., all measurements at the same unified larger resolution). This product is used in the Atmospheric Vertical Temperature Profile (AVTP) retrievals to gain the benefit of averaging the G-band channels (i.e., noise reduction) while maintain the F-band (AVTP) spatial resolution. The conversion uses the Backus-Gilbert technique. Each TROPICS netCDF file contains a granule of data with 81 spots and approximately 2880 scans, where a granule is defined as an orbit's worth of data.