New Set of 3-Dimensional Cloud Positions Produced for SGP

Published: 30 June 2026

A data plot is titled as z_relative distribution of sgppccpE45.c1.20201230.150420.nc. Heights are captured from less than 4,000 m to about 7,000 m. The count of detected cloud points ranges from 0 to 1,400. A camera snapshot underneath shows flat farmland under broken clouds. — The quicklook figure presents PCCP data from December 30, 2020, at ARM Southern Great Plains extended facility E45 near Tonkawa, Oklahoma. This figure displays the distribution of the reconstructed cloud points by time and height, and the colors represent the count of the detected points in the corresponding bin. The photo underneath the quicklook figure was taken the same day by one of the E45 site cameras at 21:55:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Additional data from the Point Cloud of Cloud Points value-added product (PCCP VAP) at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) atmospheric observatory are now available for the years 2019 and 2020.

PCCP provides three-dimensional (3D) positions of clouds captured by stereo cameras. This VAP enables 3D representations related to macrophysical cloud features such as the cloud-base and cloud-top heights, structure of cloud boundaries, and cloud-level horizontal velocities.

At the SGP in Oklahoma, PCCP data are retrieved from images captured by stereo-calibrated camera pairs at extended facilities E43 (Lamont), E44 (Billings), and E45 (Tonkawa). The E43, E44, and E45 stereo cameras encircle the SGP Central Facility at an approximate 6-kilometer radius facing southeast, southwest, and north, respectively. Each camera has an approximate 75-degree horizontal field of view that extends out as far as tens of kilometers. Therefore, PCCP may include thousands of cloud-point positions from a wide horizontal region and altitude range at a time.

The dates for the new PCCP data are as follows:

E43: March 7, 2020, through December 30, 2020
E44: December 2, 2019, through December 30, 2020
E45: October 31, 2019, through December 30, 2020.

PCCP data for the three extended facilities are available with a 20-second time resolution in netCDF format. A Python script that plots instantaneous PCCP data is also available.

More information about PCCP, including the technical report, can be found on the VAP web page.

Access the new PCCP data in the ARM Data Center. (To download the data, first create an ARM account.)

For questions or to report data issues, please contact David Romps.

Data can be referenced as doi:10.5439/1531325.

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ARM is a DOE Office of Science user facility operated by nine DOE national laboratories.