NASA HAQAST Project

NASA's Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team (HAQAST) provides satellite-derived environmental data for public health applications. The collection includes annual artificial light at night levels at county and tract levels from 2012 to 2020, and annual and monthly tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations from 2018/2019 to the present, both across the Continental United States. These Level 3 products are derived from Suomi NPP VIIRS and Sentinel-5P TROPOMI instruments.

Use Cases

• Analyzing long-term trends in urban light pollution based on annual nighttime light summaries.
• Studying seasonal and annual variations in tropospheric NO2 pollution for health impact assessments.
• Mapping spatial distributions of air pollutants and artificial light at high (1 km²) resolution.
• Correlating satellite-derived environmental data with ground-based public health metrics.

Strengths

• Data is derived from authoritative NASA and ESA satellite sources (Suomi NPP VIIRS and Sentinel-5P TROPOMI).
• Includes a multi-year time series, with nighttime light data covering 2012-2020 and NO2 data from 2018/2019 onward.
• Products are processed to a consistent high spatial resolution of 0.01° x 0.01° (approximately 1 km²).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team (HAQAST), with contributions from the George Washington University Air, Climate and Health Laboratory.

Collection Method

Derived from Level 2 satellite data products using consistent algorithms for aggregation and oversampling.

Time Range

Artificial light at night: 2012-2020. Tropospheric NO2: Annual from 2019, Monthly from May 2018, both continuing to present.

Freshness

The NO2 dataset record continues to the present, but a specific last update date is not provided.

Geography

Continental United States (CONUS).