NOAA Office of Satellite and Product Operations

Soundings: Additional Product Information

IASI

The Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) onboard the European MetOp satellite, was launched in October 2006. IASI produces temperature and humidity profiles with vertical accuracies of 1 degree Kelvin and 10 % per 1-km layer respectively. The first priority of the IASI processing system is to generate radiance products from data ingested in a pipeline mode from EUMETSAT. These radiances undergo sub-setting, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) reconstruction, and global gridding. Subsequently these radiance products are distributed to users as BUFR, NetCDF and BINARY files. All levels of data products are made available at the user specified locations, as subset files, and as gridded subsets.

NUCAPS

The NOAA Unique Combined System Processing System (NUCAPS) was developed to generate (1) spectrally and spatially thinned radiances, (2) retrieved products such as profiles of temperature, moisture, trace gases and cloud-cleared radiances, and (3) global validation products such as radiosonde matchups and gridded radiances and profiles. The thinned radiance products are produced in BUFR format using the NetCDF4 Reformatting Toolkit (N4RT) and are tailored to specifically Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) centers. The NUCAPS Environmental Data Records (EDR) products are archived in Comprehensive Large Array-Data Stewardship System (CLASS) for non-real time users and can be acquired from
CLASS.

These products are derived from the Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) and Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) currently onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) satellite and later will be available from the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS-1 and JPSS-2).