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Cloudsat Calipso heating rates

Collection of scripts and figures for cloud-radiative heating rates derived from satellite observations.

To download the CloudSat/Calipso heating rates of 2B-FLXHR-LIDAR via sftp, first follow the instructions at https://www.cloudsat.cira.colostate.edu/order/sftp-access to upload your ssh key and the IP address of the machine that you use for download. I found that to download the data using IMG Jet, I need to use SRVX1 as a jump server (maybe because of some UNIVIE-IMG firewall?):

sftp -r -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa_cloudsat -J avoigt@srvx1.img.univie.ac.at aiko.voigtATunivie.ac.at@www.cloudsat.cira.colostate.edu:Data/2B-FLXHR-LIDAR.P2_R05/* .

~/.ssh/id_rsa_cloudsat is the private key that I generated on SRVX1 and made available on both SRVX1 and Jet (this implies that I do not need to provide my password for SRVX1 but the passphrase of the key). Note that I submitted both the SRVX1 and the Jet ssh-keys and IP addresses to the Cloudsat website, though I tend to think that only the IP address of SRVX1 is needed.

Information on the dataset is available at https://www.cloudsat.cira.colostate.edu/data-products/2b-flxhr-lidar.

To read in and work with the HDF4 files, it is helpful to create a dedicated python environment. On Jet, this can be done using micromamba. See the directory pythonenv.

Directory structure

  • ethz: plots of cloud-radiative heating for a tropical cyclone
  • pythonenv: create dedicated python environment