The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) is a grating spectrometer (R = 1200) aboard the second Earth Observing System (EOS) polar-orbiting platform, EOS Aqua. In combination with the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) and the Humidity Sounder for Brazil (HSB), AIRS constitutes an innovative atmospheric sounding group of visible, infrared, and microwave sensors. This product is similar to AIRI2CCF. However, it contains science retrievals that use the HSB. Because the HSB instrument lived only from September 2002 through January 2003 when it terminally failed, the data set covers these five months only. Cloud-Cleared Radiances contain calibrated, geolocated channel-by-channel AIRS infrared radiances (milliWatts/m2/cm-1/steradian) that would have been observed within each AMSU footprint if there were no clouds in the FOV and produced along with the AIRS Standard Product, as they are the radiances used to retrieve the Standard Product. Nevertheless, they are an order of magnitude larger in data volume than the remainder of the Standard Products and, many Standard Product users are expected to have little interest in the Cloud Cleared Radiance. For these reasons they are a separate output file, but like the Standard Product, are generated at all locations.
An AIRS granule has been set as 6 minutes of data, 30 footprints cross track by 45 lines along track for each of the approximate 2378 channels. There are 240 granules per day, with an orbit repeat cycle of approximately 16 day.