Aqua/AIRS L3 Daily Support: Atmospheric Sounding Grids

NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) aboard the Aqua satellite provides Level 3 daily support products. These products contain intermediary or not fully validated fields derived from AIRS, AMSU, and HSB sensor data, aggregated into 1-degree by 1-degree global grids. The dataset supports atmospheric research and climate monitoring.

Use Cases

• Validating atmospheric models based on intermediate, gridded infrared and microwave sounding data.
• Monitoring global atmospheric temperature and humidity profiles derived from combined visible, infrared, and microwave sensors.
• Analyzing climate trends using daily, spatially aggregated satellite observations.
• Developing new retrieval algorithms using the Level 3 support product fields as inputs.

Strengths

• Data originates from NASA's EOS Aqua platform, a major Earth observation mission.
• Combines measurements from three distinct sensors (AIRS, AMSU, HSB) for comprehensive atmospheric sounding.
• Products are gridded at a 1-degree by 1-degree resolution, providing a standardized global spatial format.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as column names, row count, and file size are unknown across all sources.
• The 'support' products contain fields that are not fully validated, indicating potential data quality issues.
• Sources conflict on the 'last updated' date (2003 vs. 2026), suggesting metadata inconsistency.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Data gathered by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU), and Humidity Sounder for Brazil (HSB) instruments aboard the EOS Aqua satellite, processed into Level 3 daily gridded products.

Freshness

The most recent update reported is 2026-03-13, though another source lists 2003-02-06.

Geography

Global coverage, aggregated into 1-degree latitude/longitude grid boxes.