Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/AIRABRAD
AIRABRAD·v005·dataset

Raw microwave brightness temperatures (Aqua AMSU)

AIRS/Aqua L1B AMSU (A1/A2) geolocated and calibrated brightness temperatures V005 (AIRABRAD) at GES DISC
land NASA GES_DISC Level 1B active
In plain English

What it measures. Raw microwave readings showing how warm the atmosphere and surface look to the sensor at different microwave frequencies. Because microwaves pass through most clouds, these readings work even when skies are cloudy.

How it's made. Geolocated, calibrated brightness temperatures straight from the AMSU-A microwave instrument flying alongside AIRS on the Aqua satellite, packaged in 6-minute chunks.

How & where you'd use it. A low-level building-block input mainly used to help retrieve atmospheric temperature and to correct cloud effects in companion infrared measurements, rather than used directly by most people.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › MICROWAVE › BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2002-05-21 → ongoing
  • Measured byAqua (AMSU-A)
  • Processing levelLevel 1B
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • StatusACTIVE

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 Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) is a grating spectrometer (R = 1200) aboard the second Earth Observing System (EOS) polar-orbiting platform, EOS Aqua. In combination with the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) and the Humidity Sounder for Brazil (HSB), AIRS constitutes an innovative atmospheric sounding group of visible, infrared, and microwave sensors. The AMSU-A instrument is co-aligned with AIRS so that successive blocks of 3 x 3 AIRS footprints are contained within one AMSU-A footprint. AMSU-A is primarily a temperature sounder that provides atmospheric information in the presence of clouds, which can be used to correct the AIRS infrared measurements for the effects of clouds. This is possible because non-precipitating clouds are for the most part transparent to microwave radiation, in contrast to visible and infrared radiation which are strongly scattered and absorbed by clouds. AMSU-A1 has 13 channels from 50 - 90 GHz and AMSU-A2 has 2 channels from 23 - 32 GHz. The AIRABRAD_005 products are stored in files (often referred to as "granules") that contain 6 minutes of data, 30 footprints across track by 45 lines along track.

Get the data

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="AIRABRAD",
    version="005",
    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 GES_DISC
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.