NASA ATom Global Atmospheric Chemistry and Aerosol Profiles

NASA's Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission provides a merged dataset of greenhouse gases and air pollutants from global airborne campaigns. The dataset includes atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, ozone, and black carbon aerosols, collected across four seasonal campaigns from 2016 to 2018. It was created by NASA using an instrumented DC-8 aircraft to profile the atmosphere from 0.2 to 12 km altitude over remote oceans and continents.

Use Cases

• Improving the representation of short-lived climate forcers like black carbon aerosols in global atmospheric chemistry models.
• Validating satellite-derived measurements of trace gases such as methane and ozone over remote ocean and polar regions where ground data is sparse.
• Analyzing seasonal and vertical profiles of carbon dioxide concentrations from the Arctic to the South Pacific across 0.2 to 12 km altitude.
• Studying the spatial distribution of human-produced air pollution across long-distance flight transects over the Atlantic and central North America.

Strengths

• Provides a single, contiguous global-scale dataset from four seasonal campaigns spanning 2016-2018.
• Includes merged data from all instruments across seven different sampling intervals, with weighted averages for longer-interval measurements like flask data.
• Covers a vast geographic range, profiling from 0.2 to 12 km altitude over the Arctic, Pacific, Atlantic, and North America.

Limitations

• Conflicting metadata: one source lists a last update date of 2026-03 13, while another lists 2018-05-21, creating uncertainty about data currency.
• Specific column names, row counts, and dataset size are not provided by any source platform.

Provenance

Source

NASA's Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission, organized by ORNL_CLOUD.

Collection Method

Data gathered via systematic global-scale sampling using an extensive gas and aerosol payload on the NASA DC-8 aircraft.

Time Range

2016 to 2018

Freshness

2026-03-13 13:55:39.815611

Geography

Global, with flight paths from California to the western Arctic, South Pacific, Atlantic, Greenland, and back across central North America.