NUCAPS EDR files in the cloud
NUCAPS EDRs (Environmental Data Records) are now populating space in the cloud, such as at this Amazon webservices (AWS) link https://noaa-nesdis-n20-pds.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html. This is part of the NODD (NOAA Open-Data Dessemination) project. At that AWS link you will see a ‘NUCAPS-EDR’ directory, and dropping down through year/month/day selections, a list of filenames appears with names such as: NUCAPS-EDR_v3r1_j01_s202405141514589_e202405141515287_c202405141606240.nc ; ‘j01’ identifies the satellite as NOAA-20; data in this file starts 15:14:58.9 on 14 May 2024, ends at 15:15:28.7 on 14 May 2024, and was created on 16:06:24.0 on 14 May 2024. The file listing shown below as a screen-capture shows data from 1725 to 1732 UTC on 14 May 2024.
These data can be displayed most easily by knowing when NOAA-20 overflew a region, and this website helps with that. The GOES-East projection showing NOAA-20 orbits on 14 May is shown below. Focus on the ascending pass off the East Coast of the United States, from 17:25 to 17:32 or so.
After downloading the Sounder QuickLooks software (from CSPP), 7 commands created the mapping of temperature shown up top. First, the .qz file that includes the software packages was expanded and I changed locations to the created directory, making that the home directory with the export command. A shell script within the directory is then sourced to set up environments (one result of this shell script is that the $CSPP_SOUNDER_QL_HOME/bin directory is added to a user’s $PATH). Then I changed to the bin directory. The script ‘getall’ retrieves the netcdf files from the cloud — it’s a series of unix wget commands, i.e., “wget https://noaa-nesdis-n20-pds.s3.amazonaws.com/NUCAPS-EDR/2024/05/14/NUCAPS-EDR_v3r1_j01_s202405141725389_e202405141726087_c202405141803060.nc". The variable ‘files’ matches all of the netcdf files that were downloaded. Finally, the 700-mb temperature field is created, as shown above. (Note: because the cspp_sounder_ql_env shell script puts the bin directory in the user’s $PATH, the ql_level2_image shell script below could be invoked from any directory. In other words, there’s no need to put the netcdf files in the bin directory!)
tar -xvf cspp-sounder-ql-1.3.tar.gz
cd cspp-sounder-ql-1.3
export CSPP_SOUNDER_QL_HOME=$PWD
source $CSPP_SOUNDER_QL_HOME/cspp_sounder_ql_env.sh
cd bin
getall
files=$PWD/NUCAPS-EDR_v3r1_j01_s2024051417*
./ql_level2_image.sh $files NUCAPS --dset temp --pressure 700Past blog post entries on Sounder QuickLooks software are here and here.