Data Products

CloudSat data products are made available in HDF-EOS format and are created with HDF-EOS 2.5 based on HDF 4.1r2. Later versions of the HDF and HDF-EOS libraries should be able to manipulate the files as long as they are in the HDF 4 series. Files delivered through the online ordering system are compressed (.zip). The file naming convention is as follows:
 
YYYYDDDHHMMSS_ NNNNN_ CS_2B-TAU_GRANULE_S_RVV_EVV.hdf
 
  • YYYYDDDHHMMSS = Year, Julian day, hour, minute, second of the first data contained in the file (UTC)
  • NNNNN = Granule number
  • CS = Literal "CS" indicating the CloudSat mission
  • 2B-TAU = Product name
  • GRANULE = Indicates the data subset ("GRANULE" if the data are not subset)
  • S_RVV = Version string including the processing iteration ("P", "P1", "P2", etc.) and release ("R04", "R05", etc.).  For example: P_R04.
  • EVV = Epoch number
  • .hdf = HDF-EOS file suffix
Organization of fields and attributes in the HDF-EOS files
The HDF-EOS files are organized into heirarchical groups. The file contains a swath, which for the CloudSat mission, has the same name as the product. The swath contains three groups: geolocation, data, and swath metadata. The fields listed on the following pages are organized into the geolocation and data groups. If there are any product-specific metadata fields then a swath metadata group will be shown as well.
 
The attributes shown for each field are also stored in the swath metadata group. They are stored in the format [field name].[attribute name]. For example, Radar_reflectivity.factor contains the scale factor for the 2B-GEOPROF radar reflectivity field.