SOFIA Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV) Products for all flights with FIFI-LS between the year 2014 and 2022.
Each FITS file contains a HDU "DATA", which is a binary table extension with columns for
Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV), Longitude, Latitude and Atmospheric Pressure
as a function of in-flight time. The source for positional data
is the primary GPS sensor of SOFIA (see POSSRC keyword).
PWV values were derived from the ERA5 Re-Analysis from ECMWF
(Hersbach, H., 2020, DOI:10.1002/qj.3803).
Note: For use of PWV values for atmospheric transmission correction
by the instrument pipeline software, a specific instrument dependent
conversion must be performed. Please refer to the respective
documentation in the SOFIA Redux module for FIFI-LS for further details.
Derivation of the ECMWF PWV values and specific instrument
correlations for FIFI-LS are explained in detail in, e.g.,
Fischer et al., 2021, DOI:10.1088/1538-3873/abf1ca and
Iserlohe et al., 2021, DOI:10.1088/1538-3873/abef76.
Percentiles, Pk, for given geographical position and flight altitude
of SOFIA and season of the observations are derived
from a 10 year statistics presented in
Iserlohe et al., 2022, DOI:10.1088/1538-3873/ac82c5.
Pk means that there is a k% probability of observing a PWV value less than Pk in flight.
The FITS files also contain some water vapor maps of the region of the flight path for data validation purposes.
