Tuesday, June 12, 2007

New Dimension to Aerosol Research: CALIPSO the Space LIDAR

NASA in collaboration with CNES, BALL, IPSL and Hampton University launched state-of-art dual channel space LIDAR on April 28, 2006. Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) is flying in constellation of satellites called A-Train along with Aura, PARASOL, CloudSat, Aqua, taking Earth observations within 7-8 minutes and OCO will soon join them to complete the A-Train.

CALIPSO took its first observation (image on right) on July 24, 2006 and last December its level 1 radiance, lidar level 2 vertical feature masks, cloud and aerosol layer products are released to the public. These data sets are unique in various ways and will provide new dimension (vertical) to the aerosol research. CALIPSO provides long awaited global vertical profiles of aerosols in the atmosphere, which will be very useful for air quality, earth radiation budget and climate change studies. An example is shown below: Read More About Image Here
This graphic shows a flight comparison between CALIPSO data (middle) and data taken from the cloud physics lidar on the ER-2 (bottom) from the same time a location on August 12. The image at the top is infrared data from a GOES satellite illustrating the cloud cover that both the CALIPSO and the ER-2 lidars observe. The flight path of the ER-2 and the CALIPSO track can be seen at the right of the image as a solid line



Here in this blog post, I am providing some useful link to CALIPSO and its data sets

CALIPSO Home
http://www-calipso.larc.nasa.gov/

Watch great movie of A-train orbits
http://www-calipso.larc.nasa.gov/about/

More about A-train
http://www-calipso.larc.nasa.gov/about/atrain.php

CALIPSO outreach
http://calipsooutreach.hamptonu.edu/index.htm

CALIPSO Data page
http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/PRODOCS/calipso/table_calipso.html

CALIPSO Image browser
http://www-calipso.larc.nasa.gov/products/lidar/

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I am amazed by ability of US scientists to find out good abbreviations for project, for example
CALIPSO (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation), not only it is easy to remember, it has also dictionary meaning;

a West Indian folk-song, telling of a current event and sometimes made up as the singer goes along

Any idea who found out this acronym for CALIPSO?