TROPICS Pathfinder Radiance and Geophysical Product Data Set

The "Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats" (TROPICS) mission has a goal of providing nearly all-weather observations of three-dimensional temperature and humidity, as well as cloud ice and precipitation horizontal structure, at high temporal resolution to conduct high-value science investigations of tropical cyclones. The mission comprises a constellation of six identical Space Vehicles (SVs) conforming to the 3U form factor and hosting a passive microwave spectrometer payload. This dataset is produced from the Pathfinder satellite, a single 3U small satellite, which has launched previous to the constellation, on a sun-synchronous orbital plane.

Each SV hosts an identical high-performance spectrometer named the TROPICS Millimeter-wave Sounder (TMS) that will provide temperature profiles using seven channels near the 118.75-GHz oxygen absorption line, water vapor profiles using three channels near the 183-GHz water vapor absorption line, imagery in a single channel near 90 GHz for precipitation measurements (when combined with higher resolution water vapor channels), and a single channel near 205 GHz that is more sensitive to cloud-sized ice particles.

This dataset is from the Pathfinder satellite, as the Beta version of the Level 1B geolocated brightness temperatures (radiance) in units of kelvins that are timestamped to UTC and are reported at native spatial resolutions. Each TROPICS netCDF file contains a granule of data with 81 spots and approximately 2880 scans, where a granule is defined as an orbit's worth of data.