Vertical Temperature Profile Radiometer brightness temperature dataset and its statistics

The Vertical Temperature Profile Radiometer (VTPR) was an operational 8-channel sounding system mounted on the NOAA-2 through NOAA-5 spacecrafts. The instrument is an infrared sounder with a horizontal resolution of 55km x 57km at the nadir and 67km x 91km at the end of scan. Six of the eight channels are used to derive radiances in the 15 micron carbon dioxide band and are very similar to the subsequent HIRS channels in the later NOAA satellite series. In addition to the sounding channels, there is one channel in the 11 micron atmospheric window region and one channel in the 18 micron water vapor absorption band. The measurement covers more than six years of observation from late 1972 to early 1979. These observations provide a valuable dataset to significantly extend the HIRS sounding series which started in late 1978 and continues through present and beyond. Major work has been done at ECMWF to clear erroneous data records and to earth-locate pixels. To make the VTPR dataset assessable to the general scientific research community, we are reprocessing the full VTPR data to NetCDF format. Statistics such as mean and standard deviation are produced and provided. The statistical info facilitates the understanding of each file's coverage and general data characteristics.