Dataset corresponding to Nature submission entitled "Measurements of metastable helium in Earth's atmosphere by resonance lidar"

These are NetCDF files containing lidar return data from the helium fluorescence lidar described in the referenced paper (doi to be added). The data contain the following variables:

 'photons_chX' with X between 0 and 11: An Nx3000 array of detected photon counts binned by altitude into 2 km bins and by time into 10 s intervals. Note that only the bottom 360 bins contain data; the arrays are then padded with zeros.

 'shots_chX' with X between 0 and 11: An array of length N with the number of laser pulses fired during the corresponding interval.

 'time_offset' - A single value, giving the unix timestamp relative to which the 'time' variable is measured.

'time' - An array of length N with the midpoint time in milliseconds of the corresponding interval, measured relative to the 'time_offset'.

'altitude' - An array of length 3000 with the lower edges of the corresponding altitude bins, in meters.

This is a standardized data format used by many instruments; it contains several other variable fields that are not used by the present instrument.