CALIPSO was a long-term, highly successful partnership between NASA and the French Space Agency, the National Center for Space Studies (CNES). CALIPSO was launched in April 2006 to study the many roles played by clouds and aerosols in Earth’s climate and weather.
The CALIPSO satellite carried three remote sensing instruments: the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP), the Imaging Infrared Radiometer (IIR), and the Wide Field-of-view Camera (WFC). Immediately after launch, CALIPSO was inserted into the international A-Train satellite constellation, where it acquired an unprecedented array of coincident, multi-sensor Earth observations. In September 2018, CALIPSO began lowering its orbit from 705 km to 688 km (428 miles) to reestablish formation flying with CloudSat as part of the C-Train. By mutual agreement between NASA and CNES, CALIPSO concluded all science operations on August 1, 2023.
All science CALIPSO data products are archived and publicly distributed by both the Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC) at NASA's Langley Research Center (LaRC) and by the AERIS/ICARE Data and Services Center (ICARE). For the final data release, the CALIPSO mission added two CALIOP Level 0 data products (CAL_LID_L0 and CAL_LID_L0_PIVB), two IIR Level 1 intermediate products (IIR_L1_CAL and IIR_L1_COR), and two WFC Level 1 intermediate products (WFC_L1_Asm and WFC_L1_Cal). These six products will only be archived and publicly distributed by ASDC.
For the duration of the mission, the CALIPSO project maintained a public website that provided mission content, documentation, and imagery for both the public and the global science community. After the completion of the project, this site will be decommissioned and ASDC, along with the LaRC Science Directorate, will host the redistributed content at their respective sites.
The ASDC CALIPSO site will provide the portal to order all CALIPSO data products and will host a number of publicly available documents pertaining to multiple facets of the mission and data products. These documents include significantly expanded versions of web pages previously available on the CALIPSO project site (e.g., data product descriptions, data quality summaries, frequently asked questions, etc.) and are now updated to fully describe the content of all final release data products.