Global Brightness Temperature imagery from the Cloud Archive User Service project. This project produced a long time-series of global thermal infra-red imagery of the Earth using data from operational meteorological satellites, which was used in validating atmospheric General Circulation Models.

The source data used in CLAUS are the level B3 (reduced resolution) 10 micron radiances from operational meteorological satellites participating in the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Programme (ISCCP) and were obtained from the NASA Langley Atmospheric Sciences Data Center (LASDC).

During the CLAUS project the B3 data were first processed to create a uniform latitude-longitude grid (or image) of Brightness Temperature (BT) values at a spatial resolution of 0.5 by 0.5 degrees and temporal resolution of three hours. The B3 data were also rigorously quality controlled to remove residual noise and navigation/calibration errors that were noticed in the original processing. The 0.5 degree resolution data were updated and supplemented by a new product at one-third degree spatial resolution for use in process studies.

The CLAUS Lo-res data archive span the period 1983-2009 and the files are stored in the Portable Grey Map (PGM) format. This is a simple flat file binary format preceded by an ASCII (readable) header that contains information such as the image dimensions and version number.

For detailed information about the CLAUS data (processing, quality, etc) please see available documentation (Docs).