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

SOFIA Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV) Products for all flights with FIFI-LS between the year 2014 and 2022. Each FITS file contains a HDU "DATA", which is a binary table extension with columns for Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV), Longitude, Latitude and Atmospheric Pressure as a function of in-flight time. The source for positional data is the primary GPS sensor of SOFIA (see POSSRC keyword). PWV values were derived from the ERA5 Re-Analysis from ECMWF (Hersbach, H., 2020, DOI:10.1002/qj.3803). 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 FIFI-LS for further details. Derivation of the ECMWF PWV values and specific instrument correlations for FIFI-LS are explained in detail in, e.g., Fischer et al., 2021, DOI:10.1088/1538-3873/abf1ca and Iserlohe et al., 2021, DOI:10.1088/1538-3873/abef76. 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.