OCO-3: Space Station Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Retrievals

NASA's OCO-3 instrument, deployed to the International Space Station in May 2019, provides high-resolution atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements. It uses three independent spectrometers targeting specific near-infrared and oxygen A-band wavelengths to estimate XCO2 concentrations. The dataset includes algorithm diagnostics for cloud screening and retrieval quality, derived from a fast Bayesian method applied to the oxygen A-band.

Use Cases

• Monitoring regional carbon dioxide fluxes based on space-based XCO2 retrievals.
• Validating atmospheric transport models using geolocated, time-stamped concentration data.
• Screening for cloud contamination in satellite observations using the Oxygen-A Band algorithm.
• Estimating surface pressure and albedo from high-resolution O2 A-band spectra.

Strengths

• Data originates from a NASA mission specifically designed for precise atmospheric CO2 measurement.
• The instrument uses three high-resolution, independently calibrated spectrometers for coincident measurements.
• The dataset represents the current Version 10r processing, superseding all older versions.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are unavailable across all sources.
• The license is ambiguously listed as 'other-license-specified' without further details.
• The radiative transfer model assumes clear-sky conditions, limiting accuracy in cloudy or aerosol-heavy scenes.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Collected by the OCO-3 instrument on the International Space Station using high-resolution spectrometry.

Time Range

Data collection began after deployment in May 2019.

Freshness

Last updated on 2026-04-09 according to datagov.

Geography

Global coverage from the International Space Station's orbit.