AIRS Monthly Atmospheric Profiles and Cloud Fraction

AIRS/Aqua L3 Monthly Quantization products provide statistical summaries of atmospheric states from the AIRS instrument suite aboard NASA's Aqua satellite. The dataset compresses Level-2 retrieval data into monthly, 5-degree gridded summaries, preserving multivariate distributional features. It includes air temperature and water vapor profiles across 11 levels/layers, as well as vertical cloud fraction.

Use Cases

• Analyzing vertical temperature profile trends across 11 atmospheric layers.
• Studying the spatial distribution of water vapor using the gridded monthly summaries.
• Investigating cloud fraction variability and its vertical distribution over time.
• Comparing atmospheric state distributions preserved in the multivariate quantization summaries.
• Modeling climate patterns using the 5-degree spatial and monthly temporal aggregation.

Strengths

• Data originates from the AIRS grating spectrometer (R = 1200) aboard NASA's Aqua satellite.
• Summaries preserve multivariate distributional features from original Level-2 swath data.
• Products combine parameters over 5 x 5 degree grid cells for monthly temporal periods.
• Includes profiles across 11 atmospheric levels/layers for temperature and water vapor.

Limitations

• Specific row count, file size, and column names are not provided by any source.
• Sources conflict on license: one platform lists 'other-license-specified', others list 'None' or 'unknown'.
• The last updated date shows a significant conflict: one source lists 2003, another lists 2026.

Provenance

Source

GES_DISC

Collection Method

Quantization products derived from Level-2 standard retrieval products of the AIRS/AMSU/HSB instrument suite.

Time Range

Monthly temporal periods.

Freshness

2003-02-01 23:59:59.999000

Geography

Global coverage with 5 x 5 degree grid cells.