TC4 Costa Rica Lightning

Introduction

These lightning data were collected during the NASA TC4 field campaign and are restricted to the participants of the TC4 campaign.

The NASA TC4 (Tropical Composition, Cloud and Climate Coupling) mission investigated the atmospheric structure, properties and processes in the tropical Eastern Pacific.The primary area of interest was the  atmosphere layer between approximately 46,000 ft and 59,000 ft (14-18 km). This is where the lower part of the atmosphere (the troposphere) meets the upper part (the stratosphere).

The TC4 mission was sponsored by the NASA Headquarters Atmospheric Composition Focus Area, including the Upper Atmospheric Research Program, the Radiation Science Program, and the Tropospheric Chemistry Program. The field experiment phase was completed during July and August 2007 based out of San Jose, Costa Rica

Additional information about TC4 can be found at http://www.espo.nasa.gov/tc4/.

Data Format

The following is an example of the ASCII data, with column explanation following:

2007-07-01  00:00:13.029738312  9.6799  -84.4957  0  -212.6  0  3.4  0.7  4 .9  90  0.5  2  G

Column 1 - Date
Column 2 - Time
Column 3 - Longitude
Column 4 - Latitude
Column 5 - Altitude
Column 6 - Range normalized signal strength
Column 7 - Maximum multiplicity
Column 8 - Semi-major axis of confidence ellipse(km)
Column 9 - Semi-minor axis of confidence ellipse (km)
Column 10 - Eccentricity of confidence ellipse
Column 11 - Angle of orientation of confidence ellipse
Column 12 - Reduced chi-square
Column 13 - Sensors used out of the number of coincident sensors
Column 14 - Ground/Cloud

Contact Information

To order this data or for further information, please contact:

Global Hydrology Resource Center
User Services
320 Sparkman Drive
Huntsville, AL 35805
Phone: 256-961-7932
E-mail: support-ghrc@earthdata.nasa.gov
Web: http://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/