Community Satellite Processing Package

  NOAA Unique Combined Atmospheric Processing System (NUCAPS) EDR Software Version 2.1.1 Release

1 April 2019

Updated release of the NOAA/NESDIS/STAR Unique Combined Atmospheric Processing System (NUCAPS) for the retrieval of atmospheric profiles of temperature, moisture and trace gasses as well as cloud-cleared radiances from input Suomi-NPP and NOAA20 CrIS and ATMS Sensor Data Records (SDRs). This package is in support of Direct Broadcast 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 version 2.1, 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.

What is new in CSPP NUCAPS Version 2.1.1?

This release, CSPP_NUCAPS v2.1.1, is a minor upgrade to CSPP_NUCAPS v2.1 and remains based on Delivered Algorithm Package (DAP) v4-3_20180716. For this release we have applied patches to address five issues;

  • Skip fetching GFS ancillary data when run with --skipretrieval as they are not required for this use case,
  • Changed ancillary data fetching protocol from http:// to https:// and locks destination directory to prevent ancillary data collisions when running multiple concurrent instances,
  • Added command line option --nobreak to skip disaggregating input SDRs if they are provided already as 32-second granules (as required by NUCAPS algorithm); this saves both time and temporary disk space,
  • Added an option -r 3 to use 0.5 degree GFS ancillary data instead of 1 degree, to better match NOAA Operations who made this change on 31 January, 2019,
  • Validated to use the new GFS FV3 forecast model files which will eventually become operational. For more information on the GFS FV3 transition, please see: https://www.weather.gov/news/fv3
What is new in NUCAPS Version 2.1

This is a minor upgrade to the previous CSPP NUCAPS Version 2.0 release, including:
  • Source code is based on NOAA DAPv4-3_20180716, which has reached NOAA Provisional Status as of this release date (October 2018).
  • This release adds an option to create channel subsets, ready for conversion to BUFR, without running the NUCAPS retrieval (-k, --skipretrieval).
System requirements for the CSPP NUCAPS v2.1.1 software are as follows:
  • Intel or AMD CPU with 64-bit instruction support,
  • 2 GB RAM
  • CentOS-6 or CentOS-7 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 products),
  • lftp utility for fetching ancillary data (unless running in quarantine mode).
There are several output product files, including two NetCDF files containing:
  • Cloud-cleared radiances (NUCAPS-CCR-AR_v2r0_*.nc files)
  • Environmental Data Record (EDR) vertical profiles of temperature, moisture and trace gasses (NUCAPS-EDR_v2r0_*.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 AMSU 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)

Manuscripts containing complete descriptions of the algorithm, inputs and outputs are included at the download site.


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