OMCLDRRG: Daily Global Gridded Cloud Pressure and Fraction from OMI/Aura

OMI/Aura Level-2G daily gridded product OMCLDRRG provides global measurements of effective cloud pressure and effective cloud fraction derived from rotational Raman scattering in the 392-398 nm spectral range. The dataset bins pixel-level observations into 0.25x0.25 degree global grids without averaging, preserving all raw data for user-defined filtering. Each daily file, averaging 75 MB in HDF-EOS5 format, includes ancillary parameters, geolocation, viewing angles, and quality flags from approximately 14 sunlit orbits.

Use Cases

• Validating and improving climate models based on global daily effective cloud fraction and pressure.
• Studying aerosol-cloud interactions using ancillary parameters and geolocation information.
• Filtering cloud-contaminated pixels for trace gas retrievals from other OMI products using the provided quality flags.
• Analyzing diurnal or seasonal cloud property trends from the daily, gridded time series.
• Creating custom gridded composites by applying user-defined filtering schemes to the unbinned pixel data within each grid cell.

Strengths

• Provides globally gridded data at a specific 0.25x0.25 degree spatial resolution.
• Contains unbinned pixel-level data within each grid cell, allowing for flexible user-defined analysis.
• Algorithm development is led by a named NASA OMI scientist, Dr. Joanna Joinner.
• Cross-platform presence on NASA Earthdata and Data.gov signals recognized importance and accessibility.

Limitations

• Column names and a complete data dictionary are not provided in the available metadata, complicating precise usage.
• Metadata for size, row count, and author is inconsistently reported or marked as unknown across platforms.
• The dataset is stored in the specialized HDF-EOS5 format, which may require specific tools or libraries for access and processing.

Provenance

Source

NASA OMI/Aura satellite instrument, processed by the GES DISC.

Collection Method

Satellite remote sensing via the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI), with cloud properties derived from least squares fitting of the rotational Raman scattering (Ring) spectrum.

Time Range

Daily coverage (exact start and end dates not specified in input).

Freshness

2026-04-09 23:18:01.480435

Geography

Global, gridded coverage.