ML2DGM is the EOS Aura Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) product containing the minor frame diagnostic quantities on a miscellaneous grid. These include items such as tangent pressure, chi-square describing various fits to the measured radiances, number of radiances used in various retrieval phases, etc. This product contains a second auxiliary file which includes cloud-induced radiances inferred for selected spectral channels. The data version is 6.0. Data coverage is from August 8, 2004 to current. Spatial coverage is near-global (-82 degrees to +82 degrees latitude), with each profile spaced 1.5 degrees or ~165 km along the orbit track (roughly 15 orbits per day). Vertical resolution varies between species and typically ranges from 3 - 6 km. Users of the ML2DGM data product should read the EOS MLS Level 2 Version 6 Quality Document for more information.
The data are stored in the version 5 Hierarchical Data Format, or HDF5. Each file contains sets of HDF5 dataset objects (n-dimensional arrays) for each diagnostics measurement. The dataset objects represent data and geolocation fields; included in the file are file attributes and metadata. There are two files per day (MLS-Aura_L2AUX-DGM and MLS-Aura_L2AUX-Cloud).