The SIRTA climate testbed data set (SCTD)

Description

Observation of the decadal variability of atmospheric properties is a challenge to improve the understanding of atmospheric processes and climate feedback. Since 2002, the SIRTA atmospheric observatory has been collecting many co-localized observations from meteorological instruments and passive and active remote sensing. From this large quantity of observations, it is now possible to build a decadal database (2002–2011) that describes the 3D atmospheric column in the Paris area. This database construction is based on the same approach as the “ARM Climate Modeling Best Estimate Data”: one entire netCDF file containing homogeneous data every hour, with particular attention to quality control, that could be used by scientists that are not specialists in measurement techniques. Documentation of the quality of the data is central to the SCTD. We classify the data into three classes: (1) quality check okay, (2) exceeding extreme limit test, and (3) exceeding physical limit test. Quality controls are processed at the highest resolution source file (1 to 5 min) to quantify error bars for each variable. When multiple remote sensing instruments are combined to derive a high-level quality product (e.g., vertical distribution of cloud fraction–low, middle, and high), a more complex flag is given to document the availability and the quality of each variable. Some additional surface meteorological stations around the SIRTA site (narrower 50 km) are used to quantify the representativeness of the SIRTA measurement concerning standard surface data, so a complete spatial, temporal, and instrument measurement uncertainty is processed.