Raw microwave brightness of Earth (AMSR/ADEOS-II)

In plain English

What it measures. Raw measurements of how bright the Earth looks in microwave energy (brightness temperature) across eight frequencies, available at several spatial resolutions.

How it's made. Recorded by the AMSR microwave radiometer on Japan's ADEOS-II satellite and resampled so the channels line up spatially.

How & where you'd use it. A low-level building-block input that scientists turn into products like sea ice, soil moisture and ocean measurements, rather than using directly.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › MICROWAVE › BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURESPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › MICROWAVE › MICROWAVE IMAGERY

Coverage & cadence

Time span2003-01-18 → 2003-10-24
Measured byADEOS-II (AMSR)
Processing levelLevel 2A
Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
FormatsHDF-EOS2
StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time

Official description

The AMSR Level-2A product (AA_L2A) contains brightness temperatures at 6.9 GHz, 10.65 GHz, 18.7 GHz, 23.8 GHz, 36.5 GHz, 89.0 GHz, 50.3 GHz, and 52.8GHz. Data are resampled to be spatially consistent except for the 50.3GHz and 52.8GHz data, and therefore are available at a variety of resolutions that correspond to the footprint sizes of the observations such as 56 km, 38 km, 24 km, 21 km, 12 km, and 5.4 km, respectively.

Get the data

aa_l2a_access.py

import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="AA_L2A",
    version="1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from NSIDC_CPRD

Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.

What's measured

Coverage & cadence

What you can do with it

Get the data

Official links