AIRS3QPM: Monthly Atmospheric Temperature and Water Vapor Profiles at 5x5 Degree Grid

AIRS/Aqua Level 3 monthly quantization products provide distributional summaries of atmospheric states, preserving multivariate features from original swath data. The data combines Level 2 standard retrieval parameters over 5 x 5 degree grid cells for monthly periods. NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder aboard the Aqua satellite collected this data, with the record last updated in March 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyzing global atmospheric temperature profiles based on the 11-level vertical data.
• Modeling water vapor distribution and trends based on the humidity profile data.
• Studying cloud fraction and its vertical distribution based on the cloud property parameters.
• Investigating multivariate atmospheric states based on the preserved distributional features from Level-2 data.

Strengths

• Data is derived from NASA's AIRS instrument, a grating spectrometer with a resolution (R) of 1200.
• Products provide compressed statistical summaries that preserve multivariate distributional features of the original Level-2 data.
• Spatial aggregation is at a 5 x 5 degree grid scale, offering a consistent global framework.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Satellite remote sensing data from the AIRS instrument on the EOS Aqua platform, processed to Level 3 monthly quantization products.

Time Range

Monthly temporal periods.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 06:14:07.365525; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global coverage with 5 x 5 degree spatial grid cells.