AIRS Aqua Atmospheric Profiles Quantized Pentad Data

AIRS/Aqua Level 3 pentad quantization products provide statistical summaries of atmospheric states derived from Level-2 retrievals. The data combines parameters like air temperature, water vapor profiles, and cloud fraction over 5-degree grid cells for five-day periods. It is produced by NASA's GES DISC.

Use Cases

• Analyzing vertical temperature profiles across 11 atmospheric layers.
• Studying the distribution of water vapor concentration over five-day periods.
• Investigating cloud fraction and its vertical distribution patterns.
• Modeling atmospheric state variability using multivariate statistical summaries.
• Tracking climate trends using quantized data over a global 5-degree grid.

Strengths

• Data preserves multivariate distributional features from original Level-2 swath retrievals.
• Provides statistical summaries beyond simple means and standard deviations.
• Offers geophysical parameters for 11 vertical levels/layers.

Limitations

• Multiple platforms provide no information on row count, size, or specific column names.
• License information is conflicting: one source lists 'other-license-specified', others list none.
• Pentad periods can contain as few as 3 days of data, introducing temporal inconsistency.

Provenance

Source

NASA GES DISC

Collection Method

Derived from Level-2 standard retrieval products via quantization summarization over 5x5 degree grid cells.

Freshness

2026-03-13 19:05:34.142615

Geography

Global coverage with 5-degree x 5-degree spatial grid cells.