OMHCHOd: Daily Global Satellite Formaldehyde Measurements

NASA's OMI/Aura OMHCHOd dataset provides daily, global measurements of formaldehyde total column density at a 0.1-degree grid resolution. Each netCDF4 file contains cloud-screened average formaldehyde values alongside ancillary data like mean albedo, cloud fraction, and surface height for each grid cell. The included weight variable allows for temporal or spatial co-adding to reduce retrieval noise.

Use Cases

• Tracking formaldehyde emission hotspots and trends based on daily, cloud-screened total column measurements.
• Studying atmospheric chemistry and oxidation processes using co-located formaldehyde and ancillary data like cloud pressure.
• Validating and improving atmospheric models with global, gridded satellite observations of a key volatile organic compound.
• Assessing air quality and pollution transport by analyzing the spatial and temporal distribution of formaldehyde columns.

Strengths

• Provides daily, global coverage at a relatively high spatial resolution of 0.1 degrees.
• Includes ancillary variables like grid cell weight, standard error, and mean cloud fraction to support data quality assessment and combination.
• Dataset is hosted by NASA and available on multiple platforms, indicating established use and reliability.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, specific column names, and exact file size are unavailable across all sources.
• License is ambiguously listed as 'other-license-specified' without further detail.
• Data format is netCDF4, which requires specific tools for analysis and may present a barrier to some users.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Satellite remote sensing data from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on the Aura satellite, processed to Level 3 daily weighted mean grids.

Freshness

2026-04-09

Geography

Global