EarthCARE level-2 demonstration products from simulated scenes

Overview The EarthCARE satellite combines four instruments, a Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR), an Atmospheric Lidar (ATLID), a Multispectral Imager (MSI) and a Broadband Radiometer (BBR), from which many products will be generated on the properties of clouds, aerosols, precipitation and radiation. The dataset in this repository consists of test products generated from simulated 3D scenes produced by the Canadian Global Environmental Multiscale (GEM) model. This includes both Level 1 (L1) "input" products containing simulated satellite measurements, and Level 2 (L2) "output" products produced by running the various European retrieval algorithms on the inputs. The dataset has been produced as part of the European Space Agency funded "CARDINAL" project involving numerous European and Canadian scientists, and there are several versions representing the evolution of the algorithms during preparation for the launch of EarthCARE. The scenes and algorithms are discussed in detail in a Special Issue of the journal Atmospheric Modelling Techniques (AMT), so the overview here is limited to a summary of what is contained in this dataset. Directory structure The four main top-level directories inside the zip file are for the three simulated scenes (except for the C-APC directory, described in a separate section below), each of which represent a single 6000-km long EarthCARE granule: Halifax: A swath over the Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean to the Labrador Sea, passing close to Halifax in Nova Scotia Baja: A swath passing over the Rocky Mountains and the Baja California peninsula in Mexico Hawaii: A swath over the Pacific Ocean passing close to Hawaii Halifax_aerosol (added in version 10.10): A modified version of the Halifax scene with clouds removed and modified aerosols, to provided additional testing of the ATLID and MSI retrieval algorithms (note that algorithms involving CPR and BBR have not been run on this scene) Each of these directories contains three further directories: input: simulated level-1 instrument data (note that the data formats, e.g. attributes and variable names, do not exactly match those of real EarthCARE data, although they are close) output: level-2 meteorological products generated from the input data (note that updates to the algorithms in future may lead to minor changes to the data formats, so always use the most up-to-date Zenodo release) logs: text files logging the progress of the algorithms as they generated the level-2 data The input an