AIRS Aqua Monthly Atmospheric Support Product

AIRS/Aqua L3 Monthly Support Product contains atmospheric sounding data from the AIRS grating spectrometer aboard NASA's EOS Aqua satellite. The dataset includes fields which are not fully validated, such as inputs or intermediary values, and may contain values from failed retrievals. NASA's GES DISC produced this Level 3 support product, with metadata indicating updates as of 2016.

Use Cases

• Analyzing monthly trends in atmospheric temperature profiles using retrieved temperature fields.
• Studying global humidity distribution patterns via humidity sounding intermediary values.
• Validating climate models with satellite-derived atmospheric composition inputs.
• Investigating spatial patterns of atmospheric phenomena using the 1-degree gridded geospatial data.
• Examining time-series changes in atmospheric parameters over the Aqua satellite's operational period.

Strengths

• Data originates from a sophisticated instrument suite combining visible, infrared, and microwave sensors (AIRS, AMSU, HSB).
• Product is part of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) and hosted by the authoritative GES DISC.
• Cross-platform presence on NASA Earthdata and Data.gov signals its importance and ongoing use.

Limitations

• Specific column names, row counts, and dataset size are unknown from all sources.
• Sources conflict on license: NASA Earthdata lists it as unknown, while Data.gov lists 'other-license-specified'.
• The dataset contains fields that are not fully validated and may include values from failed retrievals.

Provenance

Source

GES_DISC

Collection Method

Satellite observations from the AIRS grating spectrometer on the EOS Aqua platform.

Freshness

2016-10-01 23:59:59.999000

Geography

Global, 1 degree x 1 degree gridded.