The "Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats" (TROPICS) mission has a goal of providing nearly all-weather observations of three-dimensional temperature and humidity, as well as cloud ice and precipitation horizontal structure, at high temporal resolution to conduct high-value science investigations of tropical cyclones. The mission comprises a constellation of five identical Space Vehicles (SVs) conforming to the 3U form factor and hosting a passive microwave spectrometer payload.
Each SV hosts an identical high-performance spectrometer named the TROPICS Millimeter-wave Sounder (TMS) that will provide temperature profiles using seven channels near the 118.75-GHz oxygen absorption line, water vapor profiles using three channels near the 183-GHz water vapor absorption line, imagery in a single channel near 90 GHz for precipitation measurements (when combined with higher resolution water vapor channels), and a single channel near 205 GHz that is more sensitive to cloud-sized ice particles.
This dataset is the Level-1c regularized-scan and limb-adjusted radiance. The input to the L1c are the L1b brightness temperatures. Details for the L1b can be found in the L1 native radiance ATBD (TRPCS-ATBD-034). The main purpose of the L1c data product is to provide users interested in imagery to have a product without the radiative limb brightening or darkening that is part of cross-track radiometers measuring a thicker amount of atmosphere at the edges of the scans. Another feature is regularizing the scan pattern to have less scan-to-scan variability. Each TROPICS netCDF file contains a granule of data with 81 spots and approximately 2880 scans, where a granule is defined as an orbit's worth of data.