Daily Global Aerosol Optical Thickness From GCOM-C Satellite

Daily global aerosol optical thickness data is produced by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency from the SGLI sensor onboard the GCOM-C satellite, launched in December 2017. The dataset provides spatially binned statistics at a 1/12-degree resolution using an Equal-Area projection. It includes average, root-mean-square, maximum, minimum, and count statistics for aerosol measurements over ocean and land.

Use Cases

• Analyze daily spatial patterns of aerosol optical thickness using the AVE statistic to track pollution or dust events.
• Assess data quality and uncertainty for climate models by comparing the RMS and Nused statistics across different regions.
• Monitor long-term trends in atmospheric aerosols by aggregating the Date and AVE fields over time.
• Validate aerosol retrieval algorithms by comparing the MAX and MIN values from this binned product with higher-resolution sensor data.

Strengths

• Global spatial coverage generated from satellite observations with a 1150-1400 km swath.
• Provides multiple statistical measures per bin including AVE, RMS, MAX, MIN, Ninput, and Nused.
• Offers data at daily, 8-day, and monthly temporal aggregations for analysis at different scales.

Limitations

• The spatial resolution is reduced to 1/12 degree through binning, which may smooth out local aerosol features.
• Specific row count, file size, and data volume details are not provided in the description.
• The description does not specify the exact temporal range of available data, only the satellite launch date.

Provenance

Source

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), from the SGLI sensor on the GCOM-C satellite.

Collection Method

Derived from Level 1B and Level 2 products by statistical processing in time and space domains (binning).

Time Range

Satellite launched December 23, 2017; specific start date for this product version is not stated.

Freshness

Daily statistical product; update frequency is daily, though specific data recency is unknown.

Geography

Global coverage.