ATMOSL2TT: Atmospheric Trace Gas Profiles from Four Shuttle Missions

Four space shuttle missions between 1985 and 1994 collected vertical profiles of over 30 trace gases, including ozone-depleting molecules, on a potential temperature grid. The Atmospheric Trace Molecule Spectroscopy (ATMOS) Level 2 product contains data for species like H2O, CO2, O3, N2O, CO, CH4, NO, NO2, HNO3, HF, HCl, and many others, reported at 53 vertical levels. NASA produced this version 3 dataset, stored in a tab-delimited ASCII format.

Use Cases

• Modeling vertical distribution of ozone-depleting chlorine and fluorine molecules based on reported species like HCl, HF, and CFCs.
• Analyzing diurnal variations in nitrogen oxides based on the availability of both corrected and uncorrected NO and NO2 data.
• Studying historical atmospheric composition trends across four distinct time periods from 1985 to 1994.
• Comparing trace gas concentrations across different potential temperature levels from 280 to 3950 K.

Strengths

• Reports concentrations for over 30 distinct trace gas species, providing a broad chemical profile.
• Data spans four separate space shuttle missions over a nine-year period from 1985 to 1994.
• Vertical profiles are provided at 53 specific potential temperature levels, offering detailed altitude resolution.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data collection ended in 1994, limiting analysis of recent atmospheric changes.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Measured by the ATMOS infrared spectrometer (Fourier transform interferometer) aboard space shuttle missions.

Time Range

April 30, 1985 to November 12, 1994

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 08:49:51.372199; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global coverage from space shuttle orbits.