TROPICS06: Orbital Brightness Temperatures for Tropical Cyclones

TROPICS06 L1B Orbital Geolocated Native-Resolution Brightness Temperatures V1.0 is a dataset from NASA's TROPICS mission Pathfinder satellite. It provides nearly all-weather observations of 3D temperature, humidity, cloud ice, and precipitation structure at high temporal resolution. Each netCDF file contains a granule of data with 81 spots and approximately 2880 scans, representing an orbit's worth of measurements.

Use Cases

• Analyzing temperature profiles using seven channels near the 118.75-GHz oxygen absorption line.
• Studying water vapor profiles using three channels near the 183-GHz water vapor absorption line.
• Measuring precipitation by combining imagery from a channel near 90 GHz with higher-resolution water vapor channels.
• Detecting cloud-sized ice particles using a single channel near 205 GHz.
• Investigating storm intensity and structure with high-temporal-resolution observations from a constellation of small satellites.

Strengths

• Provides data from a dedicated constellation of six identical small satellites designed for high-temporal-resolution observations.
• Each granule contains approximately 2880 scans and 81 spots, offering detailed orbital coverage.
• Uses a high-performance spectrometer (TMS) with 12 specific channels for temperature, humidity, precipitation, and cloud ice measurement.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as column names, dataset size, and row count is unknown across all sources.
• License information is conflicting or unspecified ('other-license-specified' vs 'None').
• The dataset is produced from a single Pathfinder satellite, while the full constellation mission description suggests a more complete data source.

Provenance

Source

NASA GES_DISC

Collection Method

Data gathered by the TROPICS Millimeter-wave Sounder (TMS) payload on a 3U small satellite in a sun-synchronous orbit.

Freshness

2026-04-09 21:33:51.202682

Geography

Likely focuses on tropical regions, given the mission's goal of investigating tropical cyclones.