Information about vertical heating structure in AIRS Quantized Level-3

The Atmospheric InfraRed Sounder (AIRS) Level-2 products capture several hundred thousand atmospheric profiles per day. This detail provides local information about important physical processes. AIRS also provides Level-3 gridded products with simple statistics in each 1 degree grid cell over periods of 1 day, 8 days, and 1 month. While these simple Level-3 files are valuable and easily accessed, they may not preserve higher-order information such as statistical distributions or correlations between parameters. Using tropical temperature and water profiles, we show how the statistically richer AIRS Quantized Level-3 products can reveal the occurrence of local atmospheric heating and moistening with higher fidelity than the standard AIRS Level-3 products.