UCLA

The atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), a sensor aboard NASA's Aqua satellite, has been collecting temperatures, water vapor mass-mixing ratios, and cloud fractions at various atmosphere pressure levels since its launch in mid-2002. The AIRS level 3 Quantization (L3Q) product summarizes atmospheric data in each 5X5 latitude-longitude grid box during a time period by a set of representative vectors and their associated weights, which can be treated as an empirical distribution. A study on the empirical distribution of AIRS L3Q data might be useful in terms of summarizing the local climate pattern. This study provides insights on how statistical methods may extract more information from the AIRS L3Q data than from the simple sample average summary in each grid box.