RTP Files

ASL uses RTP formatted files to hold Level 1b/c insrument radiance files together with atmospheric profile fields, whatever their source. These files are in a list format, meaning that the Level 1b 2D arrays are not used, such as 90x135 for AIRS.

Presently we use HDF 4.0 to store these files, which should have a trailing .rtp in their file names. In the future we may switch just holding these data in .mat files, but with the same field names. Or, we may switch to netcdf 4 for portability.

Although we chose to use these RTP files since they can be read by ASL's SARTA RTA, in practice any .rtp file is first processed by kLayers to turn point profiles into the layer profiles required by SARTA. Therefore SARTA input files are always temporary files, and we do not need to do archival storage in .rtp, as we are now. We always process .rtp with kLayers since we try to always save .rtp files using point profiles since it is easy to go from point to layer profiles, but difficut to do the opposite.