Aqua Satellite Atmospheric Infrared Sounder Near Real-Time Quality Assurance Data

Global atmospheric data is provided by the AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite, delivering quality assurance parameters twice daily from a 705-km sun-synchronous orbit. This Near Real-Time product meets a three-hour latency requirement for the LANCE system, using predictive ephemeris data. The dataset is produced by the GES DISC organization.

Use Cases

• Filtering AIRS L1B radiance data using granule-per-channel and scan-per-channel QA parameters to create analysis-ready subsets.
• Identifying potential solar glint contamination in infrared measurements using the 'glintlat', 'glintlon', and 'sun_glint_distant' columns.
• Supporting time-sensitive atmospheric research and monitoring by leveraging the three-hour latency NRT data stream.

Strengths

• Provides global coverage twice daily from a consistent 1:30pm sun-synchronous orbit, ensuring regular spatial and temporal sampling.
• Designed for low latency, meeting a three-hour delivery requirement for the LANCE system to support operational needs.
• Contains specific QA parameters at multiple levels (granule, scan, field of view, channel) to guide data filtering and quality control.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, column details, and dataset size are unknown across all provided sources.
• Conflicting license information exists: one source lists 'other-license-specified' while others list it as unknown or null.
• Uses predictive rather than definitive ephemeris/attitude data and may be produced without adjacent granules to meet latency, which could affect data continuity.

Provenance

Source

GES_DISC

Collection Method

Data collected by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on the NASA EOS Aqua satellite.

Freshness

2026-03-13 19:07:51.796825

Geography

Global