TROPESS CrIS-JPSS1: Atmospheric Gas Profiles Over Los Angeles from 2021

Vertical profiles of seven atmospheric gases and temperature measured by the CrIS instrument on the NOAA-20 satellite. The data covers a 3x3 degree region over Los Angeles from April 1, 2021, to the present, with daily files in netCDF4 format and a spatial resolution of 14 km. The TROPESS project, led by principal investigator Kevin W. Bowman, uses the MUSES optimal estimation algorithm to produce this standard product.

Use Cases

• Modeling urban air pollution transport based on vertical profiles of gases like CO and O3.
• Analyzing temporal trends in greenhouse gases such as CH4 over a major metropolitan area.
• Validating chemical transport models using satellite-derived temperature and gas concentration data.
• Studying atmospheric water vapor and its isotopic signature (H2O, HDO) in a coastal megacity environment.

Strengths

• Data provides vertical distribution at 17 levels from the surface to 0.1 hPa.
• Includes formal uncertainties for each retrieved gas and temperature measurement.
• Focuses on a specific 3x3 degree region for detailed urban-scale analysis.
• Daily temporal resolution from April 2021 onward provides a continuous time series.

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 ML.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to its single-region focus on Los Angeles.

Provenance

Source

NASA TROPESS project via GES DISC.

Collection Method

Retrievals from the CrIS instrument on the JPSS-1 (NOAA-20) satellite using the MUSES optimal estimation algorithm.

Time Range

2021-04-01 to present.

Freshness

Data collection is ongoing from 2021-04-01 to present.

Geography

A 3x3 degree region centered on Los Angeles, USA.