Introduction
The Cryogenic Limb Array Etalon Spectrometer (CLAES) measured vertical profiles
of temperature and concentrations of ozone, methane, water vapor,
nitrogen oxides, and other important species, including CFCs, in the stratosphere.
CLAES also maps the horizontal and vertical distributions of aerosols in the
stratosphere. These measurements are analyzed to better understand the photochemical, radiative,
and dynamical processes taking place in the ozone layer.
CLAES was built by an
instrument team based at Lockheed Palo Alto and launched on the Upper
Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) on 12th
September 1991. CLAES had a design lifetime of 18 months, beginning on 1st October 1991 and ceasing operations on 5th May 1993.
The Principal Investigator is Dr Aidan E. Roche.
CLAES makes measurements of thermal emission from the Earth's limb in a number
of spectral regions which are then used to derive stratospheric altitude
profiles of temperature, pressure, ozone (O3), water vapour (H2O), methane
(CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), nitrogen oxide (NO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2),
dinitrogen pentoxide (N2O5), nitric acid (HNO3), chlorine nitrate (ClONO2),
CFCl3, CF2Cl2. Aerosol extinction coefficients are also calculated for each
spectral region. Further details of the instrument are given in the
BADC help file.
The data coverage extends from
80°S to 80°N, but at any one time this is restricted to 34°S
to 80°N or 34°N to 80°S. The vertical coverage of
the measurements is from the tropopause to the lower mesosphere (10-60km).
The range over which retrievals are valid is outlined in the help file.
Data Access
This dataset is public and can be accessed from the BADC archives
Access to data and file format
The BADC holds
CLAES level 3A data (Versions 0008 and 0009)
online.
The data are provided in UARS binary format, which can be
retrieved by anonymous FTP or through
this WWW interface. Software to convert this
format to ASCII is
available.
Links to further information and references
The BADC provides several documents to help you to use this dataset. This
includes documents produced by
the instrument team at Lockheed Palo Alto, and the
help file written at the BADC. Also useful is the CLAES Data Attributes Summary and quality for data versions V9, V8 and V7.
You may browse the CLAES
Homepage where daily zonal mean maps - V9 (Altitude vs Latitude) are available for all CLAES observational
days between Jan 9, 1992, and May 5, 1993.
The principal reference for the CLAES instrument is
Roche et al.
(1993), The Cryogenic Limb Array Etalon
Spectrometer (CLAES) on UARS: Experiment description and performance,
J. Geophys. Res. Vol.98, no.D6,
pp. 10763 - 10775.
There are also special issues of Geophysical Research
Letters (Vol. 20, no. 12, 1993) and Journal of the
Atmospheric Sciences (Vol. 51, no. 20, 1994) which are
both devoted to the UARS data.
We provide a list of references
to papers using CLAES data. There is also a list of references to
other UARS papers.
Citation
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, [Roche, A.E.]. The Cryogenic Limb Array Etalon Spectrometer (CLAES), [Internet]. NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre, 2006-, Date of citation. Available from http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/view/badc.nerc.ac.uk__ATOM__dataent_CLAES .
Who to contact
For general queries about these pages or about browsing the data, you should
contact the BADC support line.
For further information about the data or the instrument contact the CLAES
Principal Investigator,
Dr. Aidan Roche or his team at Lockheed Palo Alto.
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