Hello, the question is too general - I don't know what system you use, what software/libraries are installed, and so on.

I would start with HDFView available for any system. You can use it to inspect the files (see the screen copy attached), get familiarized with the variables, build simple plots, and extract the data in ASCII format.

If you have just a single profile consisting of three columns (altitude, aerosol concentration and classification flags) then xmgrace in Linux or Origin in Windows can be used for visualization.

For more sophisticated treatment of long time series, you'll need something like IDL or MatLab - the logic will be the same - open the file, extract the variable and its vertical, latitudinal, and longitudinal values, filter, average, process the variable and plot it either in the package itself or save and plot elsewhere. If you don't have an access to either of these packages then you can go one level deeper and do the same treatment in C or python or Fortran - all of them have corresponding libraries, only the syntax is different.

Hope this helps.

Thank you sir for your fast reply. I am aware about the HDF Viewer and the extraction of vertical profile of aerosol Extinction coefficient values. My question is about classification of smoke aerosols, dust, and clean aerosols. For e.g. the figure i attach here in terms of feature mask

Sorry, from the initial question it was not clear for me what you were

looking for :)

OK, now I see - you have the reading/writing/processing infrastructure and now you want to repeat the existing feature mask yourself, using the extinction/backscatter in parallel/perpendiular channels and the corresponding thresholds, right?

Theoretically, you could repeat the algorithms described in the corresponding ATBD/articles. Do I understand correctly that you want to get working modules which would reproduce ATBD algorithms? I'm not sure that they are distributed like that.

But, let me ask you - do you want to re-define the flags or do you want to check the sensitivity or something else?

Thanks you sir for your reply again. My question is about suggestion of any post-processing tool to visualize or plot the CALIPSO based .hdf file of feature mask. The figure i shared is a tutorial based sample plot shown in CALIPSO website. Do you have any tool or technique to draw or visualize the spatial plot of feature mas?

It can be read and plotted in Matlab!!

if it is just about plotting then it's either MatLab or IDL, see the contour() function - you have to feed it with x, y, and z(x,y) where z is an array with your flags. If you don't have IDL then there's a free Linux GDL: https://sourceforge.net/p/gnudatalanguage/discussion/338692/thread/88c6ad3d/

Thank you sir for your valuable given suggestions. I hope it works. Let me try.

ANY SOLUTION FOR PLOTTING CALIPSO DATA IN R ? I TRIED A LOT BUT DID NOT ACCOMPLISH THE TASK. NEED SOLUTION FOR SAME PROBLEM AS MENTIONED BY Dudam Bharath Kumar ...

Hi...

You can plot this in any software, but prior to that one has to understand the product.

You can plot this using CALIPSO_VFM product, where you will find an information about features (i.e. clouds, aerosols, aerosol and cloud types, cloud phase, surface etc). You need to read a parameter called "Feature Classification Flags". This parameters contains each features information. It has been stored in a number format. First, it should have convert in binary and then as per the given table in CALIPSO quality statement document, the set of bites should have convert into decimal to identify particular feature.

Following is a plot I prepared in GMT (generic mapping tool) software.

First shows the feature types following by aerosol types and cloud phase classifications. Also, I attached a table of Feature Classification Flags for the product version 4.10.

Note: one should take care about spatial averaging scheme, while reading CALIPSO_VFM product. Related document is attached here.

Hope this will help.

Thank you

Piyush Patel

Please this is my first time working with CALIPSO. I need the aerosol vertical profile and aerosol subtypes. Here are some of my problems in going about the work-

1) Which parameter do I download for the aerosol vertical profile loading.

2) Do I need to order the data or download directly because the direct download is confusing.

3) Thirdly, how do I input location needed for the download?

Thanks in advance.