NASA MOPITT Project: Daily Gridded Carbon Monoxide Measurements from Satellite

The NASA MOPITT Project provides daily gridded measurements of carbon monoxide (CO) in the troposphere from satellite-based near and thermal infrared radiances. The MOPITT instrument was launched aboard NASA's Terra spacecraft on December 18, 1999, and data collection for this version 109 beta product is ongoing. This dataset includes daily mean CO profile and total column retrievals along with associated averaging kernels.

Use Cases

• Tracking global carbon monoxide pollution trends based on daily gridded total column retrievals.
• Modeling atmospheric chemistry and transport based on vertical CO profile data.
• Validating ground-based air quality measurements with satellite-derived daily means.
• Studying seasonal and regional variations in tropospheric pollution based on long-term satellite observations.

Strengths

• Provides long-term data collection starting from the instrument's launch on December 18, 1999.
• Includes both near-infrared and thermal infrared radiance products for potentially complementary measurements.
• Contains gridded averaging kernels, which are important for retrieval quality assessment and data assimilation.

Limitations

• The product is described as an unvalidated beta version subject to recalibration, indicating provisional data quality.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and spatial resolution are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for specific studies.

Provenance

Source

NASA MOPITT instrument aboard the Terra spacecraft, constructed by a Canadian consortium funded by the Canadian Space Agency.

Collection Method

Satellite remote sensing via near and thermal infrared radiances.

Time Range

Data collection ongoing since launch on December 18, 1999.

Freshness

Data collection is described as ongoing, but the last update date is unknown.

Geography

Global coverage from a sun-synchronous polar orbit.