OCO-3: Satellite Attitude and Position Data for Solar Day Analysis

OCO-3 is NASA's first mission dedicated to precise space-based measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Its Level 1A product provides depacketized raw data from three high-resolution spectrometers, each with 1016 spectral elements, capturing sunlight in specific near-infrared and oxygen bands. This retrospective processing version uses a full timeseries for calibration, aiming for higher quality input for Level 1B carbon dioxide retrieval.

Use Cases

• Calibrating the OCO-3 instrument's three spectrometers based on the full timeseries of engineering data.
• Processing raw spectral measurements (DN) into Level 1B data for subsequent carbon dioxide concentration retrieval.
• Analyzing satellite attitude and ephemeris to geolocate spectral observations for a specific solar day.
• Studying atmospheric absorption features in the 0.76, 1.61, and 2.06 micrometer wavelength bands.

Strengths

• Data is from a dedicated NASA mission (OCO-3) designed for high-precision CO2 measurement.
• Retrospective processing uses calibration data estimated from the full timeseries, which is expected to yield slightly higher quality.
• Each of the three spectrometer bands provides 1016 spectral elements of raw data.

Limitations

• Critical metadata is missing: column names, row counts, and dataset size are unknown across all sources.
• The license is inconsistently reported as 'other-license-specified' or 'None', creating ambiguity for reuse.
• Documentation is technical and assumes prior knowledge of OCO data processing levels (L1A, L1B, L2).

Provenance

Source

NASA OCO-3 mission, processed and hosted by GES DISC.

Collection Method

Space-based measurements from the OCO-3 instrument's three high-resolution spectrometers on the LEOStar-2 spacecraft, operating in Sample Mode.

Time Range

Data is for one specific solar day; the exact date is not provided.

Freshness

2026-03-12 22:49:30.852740

Geography

Global coverage from satellite orbit, but specific spatial bounds for the solar day are not detailed.