Airborne Project Description

The Goddard Space Flight Center's Lidar Observation and Validation Experiment (GLOVE) is an airborne field campaign that was conducted from January 27 to February 28, 2025 from the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The GLOVE campaign’s primary goals were to validate atmospheric data products from the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) and the Earth Cloud, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) satellite missions. This campaign relied on NASA's high-altitude Earth Resources-2 (ER-2) aircraft, which was outfitted with four remote-sensing instruments that include the following:

1. Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL)
2. Roscoe, which is a compact version of CPL
3. Cloud Radar System (CRS)
4. enhanced MODIS Airborne Simulator (eMAS)

The GLOVE campaign comprised eight ER-2 flights for a total of 40 flight hours. They include seven ICESat-2 and six EarthCARE flight segments of varying atmospheric conditions (i.e., aerosols, cirrus, and stratocumulus clouds) and surface types. Geographically, the campaign’s data- collection locations focused on Southern California, Western United States, and Pacific Ocean.

Data Product Information

The LAADS DAAC being the DAAC-of-Record for MAS/eMAS datasets, archives and serves the GLOVE eMAS acquisitions that include 42 eMAS Level-1B datasets acquired over four days in February 2025. Users may directly access and download these datasets from the LAADS DAAC.