AIRS

Frequently Asked Questions


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Q.  How I can retrieve the granule starting (or ending) time from the name
of the granules?  

A.  In the granule name:

AIRS.2007.01.01.006.L2.RetStd.v5.0.14.0.G07193004415.hdf

the code is

AIRS.YYYY.MM.DD.GGG.LEVEL.PRODUCT.VERSION_STRING.Ftag.hdf

where

YYYY is the year of the data, 2007 MM is the month of the data, 01
(i.e., January) DD is the day of the data, 01 (i.e., the first day in
Jan) LEVEL is L2, i.e. Level 2 PRODUCT is RetStd, here the standard
product using AIRS/AMSU VERSION_STRING is V5.0.14.0, F is the processing
facility identifier, here "G" stands for GSFC tag is the run tag, which
ensures the pointer to the file is unique. It is the processing time,
not the time at which the instrument obtained the data, and thus not
useful for your purposes. If the data are run through the processing
stream again, this field changes.

You must crack open the data file to get the UT start and stop for the
granule measurement by the instrument. Those times are not encoded
into the granule name.

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