Visualising Data from CloudSat and CALIPSO Satellites

CloudSat and CALIPSO are NASA, resp. joint NASA and CNES polar-orbiting Earth observation satellites. CloudSat carries a millimetre-wave radar for observation of clouds. CALIPSO carries a visible and infrared polarisation-sensitive lidar for observation of aerosols and ice-phase clouds. Data from these satellites are distributed in the form of HDF4 and HDF-EOS2 product files. We introduce a software tool ccplot capable of visualising several data sets from the CloudSat 2B-GEOPROF, CALIPSO Lidar L1B Profiles, CALIPSO Lidar L2 Cloud Layer and Aqua MODIS L1B products. ccplot is a scriptable, unix command-line tool. We released ccplot on the Internet under the open-source-compatible BSD license.