NOAA PSL CL31 Ceilometer Backscatter and Cloud Base Height Data for SPLASH

This dataset contains daily files from a CL31 ceilometer manufactured by Vaisala that was deployed at Roaring Judy in the East River Watershed in Colorado (38.7169321 N,  106.853031 W, 2494 m above mean sea level) from 21 October 2021 to 28 January 2022 as part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Study of Precipitation, the Lower Atmosphere, and Surface for Hydrometeorology (SPLASH) campaign. 

The files contain backscatter profiles, cloud base heights, and visibility. The ceilometer measures vertical profiles of backscatter using laser technology. From the backscatter profiles, cloud base height and vertical visibility are determined using with the Vaisala software CL-view. For details on the instrument specifics and the methods, see the manufacturer manual (cl31usersguide.pdf).  

The file format is the original Vaisala format (.DAT). For a description of the format see the manufacturer manual. To convert the .DAT file format to netcdf format, the open source command line Python program ‘cl2nc’ (https://github.com/peterkuma/cl2nc) can, for example, be used. 

The file naming conventions for the .DAT files are as follows:

NOAA_PSL_CL31_Roaring Judy_yyyymmdd_HH.DAT

with

yyyy: Year

mm: Month

dd: Day

HH: Hour when the first sample was written to the file

The time stamp of all data is in UTC.