Re: Getting a cloud_label field from ISCCP-Basic HGG

[Ken Knapp - NOAA Federal]

Hi

Thanks for asking your questions.

Regarding your idea of cloud_type(time,lat,lon) ... that really isn't provided. You see, for each grid cell, there are between 30 and 250 pixels(this is a general range... it can vary)  (because HGG is gridded data from the original satellite pixels). So each pixel has its own type. The fraction of each type in a grid cell is provided in cldamt_types. A variable like you suggest would possibly ignore the remaining types that are also in the grid.

The cldamt_types variable has missing data ... so those values are flagged with large integers ... please see the netCDF attributes.

Hope this helps-

-Ken

On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 12:50 PM Tsai, Wei-Ming <wei-mi...@rsmas.miami.edu> wrote:

Dear ISCCP team,

I download ISCCP-Basic HGG data and would like to see a global cloud_label field (showing values from 1-18 for different cloud types), like cloud_type(time,lat,lon), but I didn’t find any listed variable for that. There are some types and labels, but in the string form. Could you please tell me how to get this field?

Also, I see a variable “ cldamt_types (time, cloud_type, lat, lon) float32 …”. It seems to be a cloud amount field categorized by cloud types, but I have some weird value up to 3000. The cloud amount is supposed to be percentage, right?

The downloaded data is "ISCCP-Basic.HGG.v01r00.GLOBAL.2017.06.28.1200.GPC.10KM.CS00.EA1.00.nc”. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Wei-Ming

--

Ken Knapp, Ph.D.

Meteorologist, Center for Weather and Climate

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information

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