OCO-2: NASA Satellite Data for Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Measurement

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) mission collects space-based measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The OCO2_L1aIn_Pixel dataset provides depacketized raw data from three high-resolution spectrometers, formatted as the input to the Level 1B calibration process. Version 11 is the current version, superseding all older releases.

Use Cases

• Calibrating spectrometer readings based on the raw data numbers (DN) for three specific wavelength bands.
• Analyzing spectral signatures of reflected sunlight in the near-infrared and oxygen A-band wavelengths.
• Developing Level 1B data processing pipelines that require depacketized, time-correlated raw input.
• Studying instrument performance for the LEOStar-2 spacecraft's single, tri-spectrometer instrument.

Strengths

• Data is from NASA's first mission designed specifically for precise, space-based atmospheric CO2 measurements.
• Provides raw, time-correlated data from three independent spectrometers, each with 1016 spectral elements.
• Version 11 represents the current, authoritative version of this calibration dataset.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale processing.
• Some spectral elements are masked out in later processing stages, as noted in the description.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Collected by the OCO-2 satellite's three high-resolution spectrometers in Single-pixel Mode.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-12 23:04:48.904963; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global coverage from satellite orbit.