HIRDLS Software Visualization Tools

The High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder(HIRDLS)infrared limb-scanning radiometer onboard the NASA EOS Aura satellite was launched in July of 2004. The HIRDLS instrument is designed to sound the upper troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere measuring 10 atmospheric species (O3, H2O, CH4, NO2, N2O5, HNO3, CFC11, CFC12, N2O, and ClONO2) along with temperature, pressure, geopotential height, and aerosols in 4 spectral regions, as well as the locations of PSCs and cloud tops. The HIRDLS ground data processing system, developed at the University of Colorado and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, converts instrument telemetry into geophysical parameters. This results in the final Level 2 HIRDLS product which is currently in the validation stage. We have developed a suite of utilities for the quality assurance, validation, and visualization of the Level 2 HIRDLS product. These tools produce orbit cross sections, maps, and line representations of the data to achieve these tasks. Each of these tools is composed of IDL routines which are easily run within Perl/Python scripts and produce postscript format files which are then viewed using one of many postscript viewers such as Ghostview or MGV. We summarize here the capabilities of these utilities/tools and display examples of each.