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Full catalog/AERDB_D3_AHI_H08
AERDB_D3_AHI_H08·v1·dataset

Haze, dust and smoke in the air, daily (Himawari-8)

H08 Deep Blue Level 3 daily aerosol data, 1x1 degree grid
atmosphere NASA LAADS Level 3 netCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. A daily snapshot of how much haze, dust, and smoke is floating in the air, summarized over the area you'd cover by zooming in on a roughly 1-degree square of the globe. Each value is an average of all the good-quality measurements that fell inside that square that day.

How it's made. Built from the Himawari-8 weather satellite using the 'Deep Blue' method, which takes the satellite's more detailed per-pixel readings and rolls them up into a clean daily averaged grid.

How & where you'd use it. Helpful for tracking air pollution and tracing where smoke or dust is drifting day to day, especially for studies that want tidy daily averages rather than raw satellite scans.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL OPTICAL DEPTH/THICKNESSATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL OPTICAL DEPTH/THICKNESS › ANGSTROM EXPONENTATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLSATMOSPHERE › AEROSOLS › AEROSOL PARTICLE PROPERTIES

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2019-05-01 → 2020-05-01
  • Measured byHimawari-8 (AHI)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • FormatsnetCDF-4
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
  • Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
  • Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description

The H08 Deep Blue Level 3 daily aerosol data, 1x1 degree grid product, short-name AERDB_D3_AHI_H08, derived from the L2 (AERDB_L2_AHI_H08) input data, each D3 AHI/Himawari-8 product is produced daily at 1 x 1-degree horizontal resolution. In general, in this daily L3 (identified in the short-name as D3) aggregated product, each data field represents the arithmetic mean of all cells whose latitude and longitude places them within the bounds of each grid element. Another statistic like standard deviation is also provided in some cases. The final retrievals used in the aggregation process are Quality Assurance (QA)-filtered best-estimate values for cells that are measured on the day of interest. Further, at least three such retrievals are required to render the validity of a grid cell on any given day. This first release of these products spans from May 2019 through April 2020 with a potential to generate additional temporal coverage in the future. The Level-3 (L3) Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) Himawari-8 Deep Blue Daily Aerosol dataset is part of a 12-product suite produced by an Earth Science Research from Operational Geostationary Satellite Systems (ESROGSS)-funded project. The 12 products in this project include nine derived from three Geostationary Earth Observation (GEO) instruments and three from merged data from GEO and Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) instruments. The AERDB_D3_AHI_H08 product, in netCDF4 format, contains 48 Science Data Set (SDS) layers.

Get the data

aerdb_d3_ahi_h08_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="AERDB_D3_AHI_H08",
    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 LAADS
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.