TROPESS CrIS-SNPP: Los Angeles Megacity Atmospheric Gas Profiles

Six atmospheric gases—CH4, CO, HDO, NH3, O3, and PAN—are profiled at 17 vertical levels from the surface to 0.1 hPa. This summary product contains vertical distributions and formal uncertainties from the CrIS instrument on the Suomi-NPP satellite, centered on a 3x3 degree region over Los Angeles. Data are provided in daily netCDF4 files with a spatial resolution of 14 km, processed using the MUSES optimal estimation algorithm.

Use Cases

• Analyzing vertical transport and mixing of pollutants based on 17-level atmospheric profiles.
• Monitoring long-term trends in urban trace gas concentrations from the 2016-2021 time series.
• Validating regional air quality models using satellite-derived CH4, CO, and O3 columns with formal uncertainties.
• Studying seasonal and interannual variability of ammonia (NH3) and peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) over a megacity.

Strengths

• Provides vertical profiles at 17 discrete pressure levels, offering detailed atmospheric structure.
• Covers a continuous multi-year time period from 2016-01-02 to 2021-05-21.
• Data is part of a NASA TROPESS Special Collection with a defined algorithm (MUSES) and principal investigator.

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 explicit terms.
• Spatial coverage is limited to a single 3x3 degree region centered on Los Angeles.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), TROPESS project, Principal Investigator Kevin W. Bowman.

Collection Method

Satellite remote sensing via the CrIS instrument on the Suomi-NPP platform, processed with the MUSES optimal estimation algorithm.

Time Range

2016-01-02 to 2021-05-21

Freshness

2026-04-09 21:22:05.673510

Geography

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