AIRS Monthly Atmospheric Quantization Profiles

AIRS/Aqua L3 Monthly Quantization products provide statistical summaries of atmospheric states over 5-degree grid cells. These summaries are derived from Level-2 retrieval products, preserving multivariate distributional features of air temperature, water vapor profiles across 11 levels, and cloud fraction. The data originates from the AIRS grating spectrometer aboard NASA's EOS Aqua satellite and is managed by the GES DISC.

Use Cases

• Analyzing monthly distributions of air temperature across 11 atmospheric layers within 5-degree grid cells.
• Studying spatial and temporal patterns of water vapor profiles for climate model validation.
• Investigating cloud fraction vertical distribution statistics for atmospheric state characterization.
• Using multivariate distributional summaries to compress and analyze disparate atmospheric states from original swath data.

Strengths

• Data preserves multivariate distributional features from original Level-2 swath retrievals.
• Provides summaries for 11 distinct atmospheric levels/layers for temperature and water vapor.
• Aggregates data over a consistent 5 x 5 degree spatial grid for monthly periods.

Limitations

• The exact row count, column set, and total dataset size are unknown from all sources.
• Sources conflict on license information: one lists 'other-license-specified', others list 'None' or 'unknown'.
• Sources conflict on last updated date: NASA EarthData lists 2016, while Data.gov lists a future date of 2026.

Provenance

Source

GES_DISC

Collection Method

Derived from Level-2 standard retrieval products (swath type) from the AIRS grating spectrometer aboard EOS Aqua.

Time Range

Monthly periods

Freshness

2016-10-01 23:59:59.999000

Geography

Global coverage aggregated over 5 x 5 degree grid cells.