Stats Files

ASL rtp files are often time and space gridded for further analysis. All of our work on AIRS trends uses what we call stats files. The are located at /asl/data/stats/(instrument). (We may remove the directory layer "data" in this location in the future). We may also temporarily put stats files in the lustre data storage, so similar files may be found at /asl/data_lustre/stats/(instrument).

Generally these (Matlab .mat) file names follow the convention:

'rtp','_',data_source,'_',profile source,'_rad_''_kl_',year','_',type1,'_',orbit,'_',type2,'.mat'

An example file is:

/asl/data_lustre/airs/rtp_airicrad_era_rad_kl_2010_random_fs_newRTP_asc_ocean.mat

which unfortunately contains '_newRTP_' to designate a re-processing of data after a mistake and the string '_kl_' to designate that the profiles in this file are in layers, not point format. We hope to soon remove these last two strings in the future. The source of this file is airicrad which is AIRS L1C data, era means ERA Interim was used for the profiles, this file covers the year 2010, 'type1' = random, meaning the airicrad rtp files were a random subset of the full record, 'orbit' = asc to denote these data are for the ascending node only, and 'type2' = ocean, so no land data was included. Other files might contain land instead of ocean, or there may be no land/ocean indicator, which means "land + ocean".

What is not denoted is the fact that these files are zonally averaged using 40 equal area latitude zones and are also daily averaged. We may use directories to separate new stats files with different space/time gridding.

Here is a Matlab listing of the file contents (ignoring some entries that are in error or will be removed soon):