The University of Washington and the National Snow and Ice Data Center have
recently completed updating and revising the TIROS-N Operational Vertical
Sounder (TOVS) Polar Pathfinder (Path-P) data set.
TOVS Path-P data are comprised of gridded daily Arctic atmospheric
parameters derived from several NOAA satellites.
Available from July 1979 through December 1996 and stored in Hierarchical
Data Format (HDF), the TOVS Path-P data set provides observations of areas
poleward of 60 degrees north latitude at a resolution of 100 x 100 km.
Designed to address the particular needs of the polar research community,
the data set is centered on the North Pole and has been gridded using an
equal-area azimuthal projection, a version of the Equal-Area Scalable
Earth-Grid (EASE-Grid).
Variables retrieved from satellite-observed radiances for this product
include atmospheric temperature, water vapor, skin surface temperature,
total effective cloud fraction, cloud top pressure and temperature,
solar zenith elevation, surface pressure, turning angle between
geostrophic wind and surface stress over ice, emissivity, boundary layer
stratification and geostrophic drag coefficient.
The algorithm used to generate these grids has been validated through
comparisons with surface observations from the North Polar drifting
meteorological stations.
Data are available via ftp from the National Snow and Ice Data Center at:
http://www-nsidc.colorado.edu/NSIDC/CATALOG/ENTRIES/nsi-0027.html