POLDER/PARASOL Data and Services at ICARE
Three POLDER instruments have flown from 1996 to 2013 to study atmospheric aerosols, clouds, water vapor and radiative budget from space:
POLDER-1
onboard the Japanese platform ADEOS I (November 1996 – June 1997),
POLDER-2
onboard ADEOS-II (April 2003 – October 2003) and
PARASOL
onboard a CNES/Myriade microsatellite within the A-train constellation (December 2004 – December 2013).
POLDER-1 and POLDER-2 are a French-Japanese collaborative project on Earth observation from space.
The ICARE Data and Services Center is the scientific ground segment for the POLDER/PARASOL mission. In this capacity, ICARE is in charge of collecting the Level-1 data produced by the CNES/CPP and processing of the POLDER/PARASOL derived atmospheric products, including level 2 and 3 algorithms development using science codes provided by the French science team at LOA. ICARE is also in charge of the archiving and distribution of the science products to the research community (online archive, FTP, SSH).
Moreover, ICARE is also responsible for various services such as the development of specific data-handling tools, the production of browse images, and provides product documentation and catalogue. Finally, ICARE provides computer resources to allow partners to process data on the archive.
Level-1 data are available both at CNES and at ICARE. Level-2 and level-3 products and associated browse images are publicly available at ICARE for registered users (See the Data Access section for access procedures). Standard products are in native format, and derived products are in standard HDF4 format (See the Products section).
Final reprocessing
After the end of the PARASOL mission, CNES and ICARE completed a full-mission reprocessing in 2014. ICARE used improved science codes provided by LOA using PARASOL data alone as well as new codes using PARASOL observations combined with other observations from the constellation.
Over the course of 2015, ICARE progressively switched all PARASOL services to the latest version of all products (L1B.v03.02, OC2.v11.11, LS2.v10.11, RB2v19.20) and the final public release occurred in September 2016 for RB2v21.22 and all Level-3 products (OC3v11.11, AC3v10.11, RB3v18.19).
In addition to improved standard products, innovative atmospheric products also became available. In particular, a new code, named PM-L2, is based on the synergy between POLDER/PARASOL and MODIS/Aqua observations. PM-L2 products were released in April 2016.
Finally, all PARASOL data products including Level-1, 2, and 3 products were released in March 2016 in HDF5 format.
A description of the improved and new products can be found in the Products and the News and events sections.
These POLDER/PARASOL pages provide a variety of information about the mission, the products, data access and data policy.
