Precipitable Water Vapor Tables from ECMWF ERA5 Re-Analysis for SOFIA FORCAST Flights

Note

For use of PWV values for atmospheric transmission correction by the instrument pipeline software, a specific instrument dependent conversion must be performed. Please refer to the respective documentation in the SOFIA Redux module for FORCAST for further details. Derivation of the ECMWF PWV values and specific instrument correlations for FORCAST are explained in detail in Vacca et al., 2023, DOI:10.1088/1538-3873/ace6fa.

Percentiles, Pk, for given geographical position and flight altitude of SOFIA and season of the observations are derived from a 10 year statistics presented in Iserlohe et al., 2022, DOI:10.1088/1538-3873/ac82c5. Pk means that there is a k% probability of observing a PWV value less than Pk in flight. The FITS files also contain some water vapor maps of the region of the flight path for data validation purposes.