NASA GOES Project: Daily and Monthly Aerosol Data from GOES-16 Satellite

NASA's GOES-16 satellite provides daily and monthly aggregated aerosol data at a 1 x 1-degree horizontal resolution. The dataset contains 48 Science Data Set layers in netCDF4 format, with initial coverage from May 2019 through April 2020. It is part of a 12-product suite funded by the Earth Science Research from Operational Geostationary Satellite Systems (ESROGSS) project.

Use Cases

• Analyzing daily aerosol concentration trends based on the arithmetic mean values provided for each grid element.
• Studying monthly aerosol variability using the aggregated statistics of daily means and standard deviations.
• Monitoring regional air quality and particulate matter using the QA-filtered best-estimate aerosol retrievals.
• Validating atmospheric models with spatially aggregated, quality-assured satellite observations.

Strengths

• Data is aggregated from quality-assured (QA-filtered) best-estimate retrievals, which suggests a controlled input quality.
• Grid cell validity requires at least three valid daily retrievals, indicating a consistency check.
• The dataset provides both daily (D3) and monthly (M3) aggregated products, offering temporal flexibility.
• Initial release covers a defined 12-month period from May 2019 to April 2020.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download from the netCDF files.
• The spatial resolution is 1 x 1 degrees, which may be too coarse for localized or city-scale analysis.
• Row count and total file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale processing.

Provenance

Source

NASA GOES Project, Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-16 (GOES-16).

Collection Method

Satellite remote sensing data processed to Level-3 (L3) aggregated products.

Time Range

May 2019 through April 2020

Freshness

Update frequency is unknown; the description mentions potential for future temporal coverage.

Geography

Coverage area of the GOES-16 satellite, which likely includes the Americas and adjacent oceans.