Community Satellite Processing Package

  NOAA Unique Combined Atmospheric Processing System (NUCAPS) for IASI Software Version 1.0 Release

3 August 2018

A new release of the NOAA/NESDIS/STAR NOAA Unique Combined Atmospheric Processing System (NUCAPS) is available for the retrieval of atmospheric profiles of temperature, moisture and trace gasses as well as cloud-cleared radiances from input Metop-A and Metop-B IASI Level-1C and AMSUA/MHS Level-1B files. This package is in support of Direct Broadcast (DB) users, and is sponsored by the Community Satellite Processing Package (CSPP) project funded by the NOAA/NASA Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS).

NUCAPS development is led by Walter Wolf and Lihang Zhou at the NOAA NESDIS Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR). This CSPP release was created in close collaboration with Chris Barnet (the NOAA government science lead for NUCAPS from 2003 to 2013) and his staff of developers of the NUCAPS science code, Antonia Gambacorta and Nadia Smith, who are the scientists most familiar with the algorithmic and scientific underpinnings.

This CSPP release provides NUCAPS for IASI version 1.0, adapted and tested for operation in a real-time direct broadcast environment. The software contains binary executable files and supporting static data files, as well as input and output files for verification of a successful installation.

IASI is the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer, AMSU-A is the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-A, and MHS is the Microwave Humidity Sounder that fly on board the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) Metop-A and Metop-B. The instrument raw data observations can be acquired via direct data downlink and processed to the required input format by the the ATOVS and AVHRR Pre-processing Package (AAPP) distributed freely by the EUMETSAT Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) Satellite Application Facility (SAF).

CSPP NUCAPS for IASI Version 1.0 Output Products

The output products include two NetCDF files containing:
  • Cloud-cleared radiances (IASI-CCR_*.nc files)
  • Vertical profiles of temperature, moisture and trace gasses (IASI_L02_*.nc files)

    • Atmospheric temperature [K] at 100 pressure levels
    • Atmospheric moisture [g/g] at 100 pressure levels
    • Atmospheric ozone [ppb] at 100 pressure levels
    • Atmospheric liquid water [g/g] at 100 pressure levels
    • Carbon dioxide dry mixing ratio [ppm] at 100 pressure levels
    • Trace gas mixing ratios CO, CH4, HNO3, N2O, SO2 [ppb] at 100 pressure levels
    • Surface skin temperature [K]
    • Microwave surface emissivity
    • Column averaged CO2 per AMSUA Field-Of-View (FOV) [ppm]
    • Cloud top pressure for up to two cloud layers [hPa]
    • Cloud top fractional coverage for up to two cloud layers
    • 10 Stability parameters including CAPE, Lifted Index (LI) and Convective Inhibition (CIN)

System requirements for the CSPP NUCAPS IASI v1.0 software are as follows:
  • Intel or AMD CPU with 64-bit instruction support,
  • 2 GB RAM,
  • CentOS-6 64-bit Linux (or other compatible 64-bit Linux distribution),
  • 6 GB of disk space (plus space for your own DB data and CSPP NUCAPS IASI products).
Manuscripts containing complete descriptions of the algorithm, inputs and outputs are included in this release.


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