Aura MLS data for studies within ACAM

Point of contact

Access to Aura MLS Level 2 data

The MLS Level 2 data are provided in HDF-EOS version 5 format. The current data version is v4 (the fourth "public release" of the Aura MLS measurements). In v4, "standard" products include vertical profiles of the abundances of BrO, CH3Cl, CH3CN, CH3OH, ClO, CO, H2O, HCl, HCN, HNO3, HO2, HOCl, N2O, O3, OH, and SO2, along with temperature, geopotential height, relative humidity (deduced from the H2O and temperature data), cloud ice water content and cloud ice water path, all described as functions of pressure.

For most products, profiles are output on a grid with vertical spacing of six surfaces per decade change in pressure (~2.5 km) in the upper troposphere and stratosphere (coarser above). Water vapor, temperature, ozone, and relative humidity are output on a finer 12 per decade grid up to 1 hPa. Because of smoothing imposed on the retrieval system to enhance stability and precision, the true vertical and along-track horizontal resolution of the products is typically somewhat coarser than the reporting grid.

Standard products are stored in files named according to the convention: MLS-Aura_L2GP-<product>_v04-20-c01_<yyyy><ddd>.he5. Files are produced on a one-day granularity (midnight to midnight, universal time) and named by the observation date, where <yyyy> is the four-digit calendar year and <ddd> is the day number in that year (001 = 1 January).

Further information about the usage and reliability of Aura MLS measurements, including detailed instructions for quality screening, discussion of the instrument averaging kernels, guidance for comparisons with high vertical resolution data sets, and other caveats can be found in the MLS v4 Data Quality Document.

References